issue 23 > poetry > richman

I spend another night with banshee dreams.
Baudelaire walks with me through streets lit
by the junk food stations of the cross.
Rimbaud, drunk on absinthe, attempts
to seduce me at a cowboy bar.
I get up and listen to trucks going someplace
and think about people I know are dead.
Outside the motel window are those junk
food stations of the soul. Too many nights
in cheap motels have unnerved me.
Kathi has drunk the last of the beer. For a moment,
I even forget where I am, and when I remember
I want to forget.  Everything outside is as closed
as my nerves.  Synapses shut like claws.
I light another cigarette as the curtains begin to glow
a fist of light.  When I was a kid I liked to pretend
I just dropped onto the Earth and had no past.
I was I, completely, only sensation, without time.
Her ass rubs against me. She mumbles
another man’s name. Eighteen wheelers grind
up mountains of ice. All 37 years of me frenzily
metastasize in my head. I flick on the TV and stare
at fat women exercising to a Musak version
of Bob Dylan's "Blowin' in the Wind."