Nocturnal Orphans

Centimeter slices of sunlight
inching across a frayed gray rug.
Blurred pupils, eyes half-pried.
(& I never really knew
how to describe their color.)
Mother, look at your baby boy,
your pride and joy, arising from a bed of
scattered pine needles and oceanic blue sheets
in a dress of matching hue.

I wonder,
there must be some
skeletal chamber within Duke’s
library system where the collective,
catastrophic nights of its constituents
are catalogued.

I
Spilled garbage can guts.
Fire extinguishers unleashed.
Phony false alarms.

II
Frost once wrote about travels through
the forest into darker woods,
a waking/dreaming life.

Pete is navigating through both tonight alternating,
outrunning phantom police sirens
on a daunting quest. The supernatural
supermarket where I once spotted a mirage
of Ginsberg spying Whitman
glows eerily ahead.

Meanwhile, Dave’s a camper captured
in Frost’s darker 2nd wood, pining for deliverance,
cringing nude,
shackled and paddled,
by a girl no one can describe
or prescribe for anyone.

III
At coordinates foreign at first,
daylight has a way of morphing
one’s wavering recollection into a reality
straddled by a buxom, leopard-skin-pantied
rose of Texas. An escapee clad in bicycle shorts,
an exodus across low-income housing
districts wearing a knockoff African dashiki.

IV (a conversation recorded anonymous, September 14th, 2007)

‘How fucked would this nation be if there were a gizillion hillary Clinton
clones. Fuckin bi-sexual. my husband was a semi popular president?: who
didn’t give a fuck-he was jacked off by fucking monica Lewinsky but its ok
because I was fucking jacking off other girls and now im fucking democratic
president. FUCKING DEMOCRATS. Obama’s okay, he’s young, but fucking arabs.
There you go. Obama is a fucking arab. Black people, arabs, whats the fucking
difference-they’re both not white.’

zero recollection.

V
A congregation of burnout angels huddled under
a Native-American comforter in a geometric,
strung-out mound. I crane my neck upward to see a
room drenched and dripping in red. The window,
slightly ajar, puffs of smoke snaking
out and skyward, spirals illuminated in flickering
pale searchlight.
A strange camouflaged girl on her side, hand
on hip, her tongue curiously stroking inner ear.
She coos along with the turntable, her whispers
floating & swaying drug-altered through my mind.
I shiver incessantly. There are no blankets but
I’m melting into her.
The needle spins in a perpetual groove as the
earth rotates into a dawn advancing. I’m stirred awake
by something, I can’t say what. The bulb has burnt out,
and the room possesses the chilled shade
of unpolished steel, a silent grey.

In some hazy resurrection I am alone.

VI
Mysterious scrapes.
Awaking with bruises where
no bruises should be.