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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