What deft work fingers make
in such small circles,
twisting at the
cloud puffs of my mind,
pulling at globs of brain clot,
stuck deep where the
noises of the day
still scratch and tick
like a crackling music box.
My head, a vessel,
a rickety barnacled tug that
chugged through the upper-reaches
of over-grown shopping malls,
where women carried neon frowns;
children tugged at the
shackles of coin operated leviathans.
Becalmed in pungent business districts,
down punch-card streets
where men with typewriter mouths
spewed data-orgasms.
I hoved home through swampy suburbs,
filled with the howls of beige beasts
in alligator-stained polo shirts.
Along the way, caught
on so many snags,
mired in sludge and
disused junk-mail hedges,
my mind cluttered and
dragged almost to the bottom.
Now such surgeon fingers ply off the
world’s clinging clank of
buckled soda can epiphanies
until so much silence,
like a goblet of wine,
full and sweet, flows down,
cleanses the throat of my mind.
