east village cathedral steps
snapshot cigarette break
parked between safecrack fingers
smoke curls, skyward swirling, a cyclone smell
of metropolitan transit steel stained fingers,
and communion inside

east river firebreather dusk
tilting slowly towards terror twilight
and further into the violet hour, a palette
of sky harboring silver nimbus

All Saint’s Day & homeward bound
half-dead & dynamite,
chronicling husker fiascos
Louie Armstrong subway butchers
drug-addled & undulating

surfacing in the Apollo light
yesterday’s flannel under pharmaceutical stars
a Harlem yankee’s reality
ambulance sirens cast campfire glows
upon gated bodegas and crumbling tentaments
preteen handcuffed procession
marched past police precinct murals
and marijuana predawn dogwalkers

Home, finally, cannonball into
a red sea of bedsheets
and daybreak’s searchlight,
exposing a notable absence