Salt and scum of the earth

Automatic hum highways and passing landscape
inverted in the rearview mirror of memories
scribbled like crops the farmer collects.
Words like “death” hide in beeswax.
Lick your lips, taste the sweat
of infantile ideas. Damaged cuticle beds
hold nails but no hammers to hammer
thoughts into the plaster page of notebook.
Birds’ nest blues hark the hawks
of war, watch them go about their
bath and bed and battle times.

But tonight will be booze and breasts and,
oh, that’s so boring. The bar’s panacea,
a glass half-empty we’ll sip down
to buzzed bliss in our thirst for idealists.
Sirens outside, the squeals of squalor,
and cursive thoughts meet Columbus Circle,
try to navigate the subway’s cement.
Sift through crowds, flour through fingers, and
dear sirs or madams become Pound’s petals
you’ll always remember to remember.

Drop the paper, let the black and white
bloom like atom bombs in the tray.
You’ll find Detroit luminescent,
falsely beautiful; its caution tape lines
read backwards are paradigms of true
crime control in the police state of mind.
But forget this bag of bones and veins and
blood’s jail cells. It comes down to the
hair curls that float to the bathroom tiles
of everywhere, and the unheard razor’s song,
automatic hum.