1.
forgetting last week like you forgot the past

two decades of life like two wet socks 

from yesterday's downpour washing clean

the streets splashing traffic on your skin

2.
from high above the flooding puddles
second looks plop down
a landscape of eyes
wide and shot blank

in the face of strangers

reflecting us

3.

we are something of the glass variety
kept behind the local display of the familiar
novelties sold on corners
half-priced with bad weather

4.
we sleep on our shoulders
at odd angles and hours

all heads and necks creased
and tucked in secret at night

5.

at night we slipped to escape the glass

the glass fell through to the floor

floored between a thousand gaping hands

hands all with their eyes closed 

closed for the evening of nightmares
nightmares and dreams

6.
the elevator carries up broken mirrors
and disabled hands come down
detached at the waist
then rejoined in bed

7.
a neonlit child calls.
her lost shadows form an assembly line
out under the dim red cross,
the echoes of her mother,
a mother,
no mother.

(she will learn how to share
all things good in time)

8.
in departure there is return

9.
to the caged monkey
i will sing

10.
full belly, full moon,
go sliver by sliver,
she left us
all alone
in a land of strangers
stranger than we,
no belly, no moon
to walk by tonight,
no belly, no moon
warm dark to cold light.