Tuesday, April 22, 2025

April 22

 xico City Blues


One parched summer night 
when the sidewalk sang like sandpaper
When the gutters cried out 
for just a sip of Yuengling
You took off your soda cracker glasses 
and smoked on your balcony and swore
At the salsa music sashaying up from
The self-serve car wash fourteen stories below.
Floors of gnawed linoleum. Palm stabbed 
with a toothpick. A cosmic splinter.
Woken up every hour by the fire alarm.
Stomach churning with Tums and Pepto-Bismol. 
Planets reeling around the sun's greasy axle,
You squinted into the C-shaped telescope
And marveled at the constellations dusting
Your t-shirt. A tiny arrow pointing, You Are Here.
Until you weren't. Nothing left but an ashtray 
of a grizzly bear peering into a pool
of butts swimming upriver to spawn. 
A crumpled Kerouac paperback. 
Half a pack of kosher franks in the fridge,

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