What if we all wore rainbow scarves like the eighty-year-old man in the alley by the Globe with popcorn kernel teeth and a first name that means Open.
Poems on the ground labeled:
A boy in need of a bicycle
For a golden-hearted lady
An old dog wanting a lick of sugar
I slice my yellow For the adventurous at heart envelope open
on the steps of a chirping church
I cut trees with my hands,
my fingerprints like the rings inside a fallen stump,
faint but
there.
My poem reads:
You suffer from word-ventriloquism. You pull the string and speak, but it is not you talking.
And I realize
I have lied
in my writing
for so long,
London a scrub-down
mixed of pulsing
orange peels
clove coffee
the powder of my parents’ pawprints
in snow
telling me to tell a true story
one that truly hurts
like a last hug on gummy concrete steps, streetlamps photographing our shaking shadows
like an elementary school umpire shouting, “Nobody wins, it just begins again”
How did Shakespeare do it
did he stumble in his stubble
every time he shaved
a stranger slitting a violin at midnight
a hollow body iambically astronauting
back to Stratford
see the suspension
the penny cutting the edge
of ice
ringing
I guess what I’m trying to say:
What if we all wore rainbow scarves like the eighty-year-old man in the alley by the Globe with popcorn kernel teeth and a first name that means Open, hat laced with dandelion stems, chewing black licorice, passing out periwinkle paper poems for free?
What if we were all vaulted
cellulited & ceiling-less
