A Goth in Mufti

The tip-tap claw,
the panther’s paw,
Across the mouth,
some youth restored,
In pintails, stripes,
in straightened seams,
And chemical abandon.
This is a transport poem,
born of engines,
The resonance and tick,
in time to pictures,
Moving in the windows,
a fit brought on,
by flickering,
the flash of sun,
through verticals,
the sudden brake,
of many tons,
the Green Flash,
missing tragedy,
by seconds.
Here is fear of ends,
The dwindling ink,
The words in deep,
Cannot be fished,
Dragged out of mind,
Or accented,
Or commonly made
From variance of speed,
A graph of time
And creativity,
Bounced calligraphy,
Rendered down,
To doctors scrawl,
A failing list,
Of diagnoses,
Diseases of the mind.
This is a dream,
A vision of wet money,
The avaricious fingers,
Pad-to-pad in space,
Between you,
This summer cloned,
From those before,
A text or call,
To fill the air,
That was so still,
Once on days like these,
A torture in the sun,
Battling the AC hum,
The recharged Freon,
Strange accents,
Not from here.
Gas and filtering,
Slow random walks,
Of insects on the windows,
Gathering intelligence,
On glass, a hanging solid,
Poetic nothing,
Short-syllabled,
Blocks escape,
Of all but light,
Expats’ welcome finance,
Sucked-in sighs,
And memories of court,
And mobs and riot,
None no-better,
In the eyes of judges.
They have an empty talent,
No talent, no desire,
And no claw or paw.
I’m deciding on my end,
Gauging distance,
Measuring to home.
I blend numbers,
Mix up metric,
In the minds of tonnage,
Built into the ships,
The tankers leering,
Looming over terraces,
Slowly dragged before,
And to the bay and home,
So many days aboard,
And boredom,
Crying in the hold,
The last of worlds,
Not knowing home,
Where they come from,
Where they want to be,
Stateless armies,
Brought low with misfits,
The split of mind and brain.
Write in the strange look,
My mad patina.
Think of swallows
Looping superficially,
Lacking rhymers’ dictionaries,
Lacking all sense,
At docks,
The sun heats steel,
Transparent
With the heat and salt.
This is an empty reel,
A note of tip-tap claw
And panther’s maw.