Growing old in a meat plant
as the stars laugh at four a.m.
We could slide off the end
of this struggle, the height of screaming
to be heard. Eat the wanting to be seen.
A breakfast of longing,
a lunch of despair,
for dinner a bowl of rotting tears.
Then shit chains of meaning something
a pile of alright-ness
a wedge of acceptance.
For the [planets] are as near as clouds,
and instead of text messages, we send
paper airplanes of kissing you.
Because the freeway is just ocean waves.
You can walk on it, trust me.
And there are so many friends here waiting
for us: Keats, Eliot, Bukowski,
Dostoevsky in his finest woolen coat because it’s foggy,
Shelley, Kahlo, Neruda, Van Gogh,
Bradstreet, Bradbury, Satie and Wordsworth,
Coltrane, Levine, Davis, Holiday,
Winehouse, Saroyan, always Saroyan, Poe, Matisse,
Cummings, Wilde, Cezanne and Bacon, waving damp pages
across grins of magnetic uncertainty. They are eating
pears and don’t you want to join them?
Your gentle wrists bare under street lamps,
the frayed edges of your __________,
a treat to be devoured in good company.