poem: sunset blvd

isn’t this fun?

June evening-lit June bugs fly like dragons,

knocking against screen-covered windows of one bedroom

joven souls and gilded martyrs being plucked from this time signature.

just in time for us, they say.

yesterday’s purple lights gleamed from city edifices and I

ran down Sunset Boulevard, awake and

aware of dorm room bestfriends that drank Blue Moons in light of a white one.

I flensed myself of blubber, of skin, dead skin,

of polyester, and cotton blends.

All I wanted,

I wanted to see the sunset’s clouds and see the mouths

move without being able to tell what they were saying.

The inviolable truths of this street and that alleyway,

the shivaree of four-door cars moving their parts,

of women and men shuffling their feet

and their toes and their phones.

Of wonderful and terrifying monuments to this city

If snow could fall and blur these smirks,

muffle these boisterous freakshow torments

If we could lie our bodies across pavement and breathe without fear our lungs

may shrivel into bone marrow.

Like a gunshot, like a firework,

this noise it haunts these one- and two-bedrooms, empty or not.

Tonight we will slice our forearms in honor of the philanderers that made us crawl

into hollowed-out spaces where furniture once sat.

Tonight we will moan and masquerade and bend or bodies into oblivious structures

and no one will see