"Midnight and the sunglasses twirl"

we are all out of the limelight and stuffed full with the envy of our betters, our peers who rose and clamored- whilst under the stairwell, in the depths of the bookstacks, out of the closet, around the corner, beneath the stars, below the cliff, in the caves, last in line, clinging to the bridgework, hiking over the cobbles, and tripping (tripping) down the alleyways (hippityhoppity) we came and went. let's do it, let's rise and get the world in our clutches, tear it loose and suck the juice out of its asphalt, the marrow of my steel buildings my cables strung just so. I want to be rewarded for my hunger, do you hear me? Rewarded! Keep your pickpocketed allegiance, the mouths of your lovers and all the red glare off the sequins, keep my stale breath, my arrogance, your karaoke nights and sighs of too too sweet memory too too pale skin against the starlingblack bedroom walls (the dance halls, yes, even), own up to your ignorance of my greatness, the bland poison of your praise, buy yourself all the pretty things and fill that glass right to the top-- keep the badly raised bread, the vicissitudes of your memory and the piles of cash we were promised No not the piles of cash- we ALL get the piles of cash. Equally, soon and very soon. yes, I will, I'll buy my way out of your memory so I can get back to my green riverfront, my lush windowpane view of wind in the small leaves across the street, the woman who smokes everyday in the courtyard, the thrust of the trucks and the fucking sparrows (yes, fucking, like birds up there everyone nesting together and puffing their feathers out, twitchy and too-fast to see everything) dreams of the dry world wnd whipped dancers and whorls of light coming at us through the tracks of rain (no, not out in the west, there its the memory of tracks of rain and the only whorls are the stars above the wheat the tornadoes the firestorms on the mountain tops and the direly desired things wired along the highways, my body Paulo, yours nothing like Francesca but I wish it was here in the rainless foreground where we are backstopped by eternity amid the indescribable orangebrowngreenblue) I'm coming at you with flowers in my teeth, a gleam of futures upon the desert in my eye and memory of things that haven't happened yet to you or me or youandme, your hair ever so lovely. But this warning bears repeating: I'm insufficiently famous and I might take flight, only if I can't avoid it.


"Get that fucker hanging on the wall and tear him loose, the stars are coming out. There is a TV set in a window, it says, 'The stars are coming out.'"