Where everything is, exactly, now,
how it resides in a certain
field of vision
and then punches out of the air
into explosive fact, anchors
in empty cylinders,
one foot on the ramp
and a hand
that cannot remember
the street.
He showed her into the living room
and felt for the buttons on his collar
while she watched him over the bridge of her nose.
Miles from tolerable,
single photographs in separate boxes
laid out in a grid,
motion and sparse
arrangement, naked
human beings
hurled into darkness
and you couldn’t even look up
but who could
with the neon
twisting like an interstate
through our bodies.
No one heard me
peeling the orange.
I lived mostly as a walk
through frozen iterations
of a neighborhood,
everyone’s briefly meeting faces
seeming to allude
to a future conversation
in a smoke-filled garden
draped in beads.
Theories found us
huddled in our comfortable resemblances,
scouring each change
in the melody of conversation
for a method,
a route through the atmosphere
from eyes like condemned theaters
to the adventure of pure meaning
we are sure awaits us.