I woke up
Turned on the light
I walk away with bloody hands
I go into the bathroom and wash away
The pain of everyone hurting me
I wrapped up my hands
Walked out the front door
The street lights explode
After I walk under them
I sit down in the blackened world
Everyone sleeping in their cozy beds
I go down to the end of the street
There is a car that shines the headlights
The car freezes right there and does not move
I touch the car
It knocks me back and I black out
I wake up and it’s morning
The shattered bulb is not shattered
I look at my hands and they are not cut
It was just a dream
And the blackened world is all light
Until I dream again.

Now happy they are
They do not have a car.
Or they’d have the sorrow
the car was so narrow.
The car was so cheap
the color was so deep.
Model was so old
inside was not cold.

Now happy they are
they do not have a car.
Or they’d have it to say
their relatives and friend
they were going to buy
A car of new brand.

Now happy they are
they do not have a car.
They do not have the grief
that the car’s so cheap
that the car’s so narrow
that the car’s not cold
that the car’s so old.

He sat on a bench in his wrinkled suit
And stared for a while into the night
seeing for the first time
and embracing the theory of everything
He walked along the weather beaten sidewalk
Knowing somewhere beneath
Were pipes and tubes which fed homes
And trees with equal efficiency
He saw the oneness of it all
And the isolation of each
He saw the mercury vapor
Boiling in its glass pot
And spewing the yellow sheen
Urine colored and voiding light
Which was the light of modern living
He knew the principles and the reasons for each article
For plumbite and graphite for halide and aldehyde
Nothing escaped the fusion of invention and inspection
He heard the sounds and knew why
Sound traveled with his steps
Why sirens dwindled into distance
And pitched as they rushed toward him
There was one thing
Foreign and lost
Which now occupied his thoughts
Disconnected from oneness and enlightenment
His car, where had he parked his car?

The long, discontented crackle of thunder
took Keats from Brea’s down comforter
to a concrete balcony,
three stories up.

He grabbed a book off a white wicker table—
The Storm Passing—
a hardbound dusty-green anthology,
empty of his poetry.

Writing a few lines in the margins as
he walked through the balcony’s metal bars
and floated,
Keats began humming.

Right above the girl’s Chevelle,
grayblue lightning flashed
between two small mountains.

The ghost saw Brea in her panties
as she walked outside with an open can
of Natural Light.

She slid in her car through the open
driver’s side window,
looked at herself in the rearview
and frowned,

‘Go to Vegas.
Get out of here.
Go to Nevada.’

As the car turned over,
the ghost noticed that
the wind that had caught his senses
from inside was now pushing a
Coke can in circles
on a sewage drain.

a robin lives here
well, a variety of birds do
but this robin is special
see he likes to perch
upon side mirrors
and windshields
staring at himself.

he might be vain
but more likely intimidated
because he attacks the
car’s windows.

peck, peck.
peck, peck, peck.

fluttering frantically
fighting in mid-flight
an easy mistake
for a bird.

he drops fast
dodging, ducking
his doppelganger’s
blows.

flit, flit, flit, flit
go his
soon to be
tender strips.

the windows suffer
tic-tac scores
a thousand stabs from
a seed crushing beak

peck, peck.

the robin retreats.

the car scratched
and defiled
melted white chocolate
and cookie crumbs
drip down the door.

it seems our bird
had to fight for his life
against an enemy as
dynamic
and agile as him
preempting every move.

every peck filled him
with such terror
that he lost control
again
and again
and again…!