boxes

1.

summer saved in the buttery voice of a sultry woman singing gently sad songs to us, deep in our mugs. attack the heart, my extremities are cracked. sir, there is no need for your glare, my eyes are vacant & unsold. how to process these requests for connection, to be in on the untold? evening steeps, already darker than my tea. the names i do not wish to amass, pile in my exiled brain. keep it short, lest the scroll unfurl too indifferently. it is much too slender inside his loudly. i do not have the heart to tell him, not every dot, nor every dash, just because it itches, doesn't mean you scratch. just sit for awhile with this passenger, i would say, and he will choose his own exit, i meant but did not share.


2.

gleeful, dog spilled sidewalk, creamy rivulets lick their way toward gutter.
the guilty puppy is relocated, its leash looped over a convenient branch. 
do women's hands betray them, i think, behind her back, and does that 
mean she is someone else until she reaches? her head is hatless,
and her hair is coffee dark, but without the cream, and tousled, 
as if her head had only just recently been released from dream. 
she is holding a cigarette in one pale hand too thin to ever suggest 
elegance, like the ghost of a spider, flexing in its murderous sleep.
the cigarette unfurls its banner beneath my window. her sit
is brief, it is too brisk out there to think. we have swapped 
moist cool for bone dry cold in some sort of climate exchange 
we have only just begun to understand. she takes deep drags 
as she thumbs the phone in her other hand, soon replaced 
with a turquoise box, and then a cherry red lighter, as if her 
hand could not be denied the shape it craved, its need to hold
something, anything when you're alone, floating in the cold 
shade of a too bright morning, and then she erupts to her feet 
and stabs the cigarette into the dirty black plastic claw, 
permanently frozen in mid-grasp, it smolders in her absence
on the silver sidewalk table, as if spitefully smoking back. 
an unquenched silence given no mouth to feed.

3.

on the side this light so obviously prefers on the corner 
across the street, shades of primary blue huddle their 
rectangular glow around a tall skinny blue bus stop sign, 
a little island saving sunlight's refugees, shade peeled 
from the curb at nearly the speed of neglect. there is 
another sign, almost as tall and skinny too, but not blue,
a silver sentinel that always stands one step to the side 
to perfect its estrangement. its face is white and its mouth 
cannot unsnarl itself from the grim shape of an empty, 
black & white bus, the silver sentinel guards the little 
island of blue, facing away from what is always offered 
freely, its one eye red & slashed, as its pupil collects itself 
into a letter that stares meekly into the easily defeated 
autumn sun.