At the Periphery (Fragments)

A Gypsy band of oranges cross the street
And my friends and I watch them
Move to the periphery where the night disintegrates into the horizon
We talk about it for a moment
About the sound of poverty and the sound of theft
Then forget what we’re talking about
Like blank drips out of your forehead; reverse Chinese water torture.
More music comes from a yogurt shop of European flavors
Flavors not for a fat American pallet
But for the anorexic and dying
Decaying tastes of the periphery that will be crowded out
Soon
The sound is three middle aged women who play middle aged music
Old feely folk from 60’s south or southern green as Keats would say
Or Southern desert draught of skeletons and Mexican kids
As someone else would say
I open my mouth with something about youth
My friends nod about youth
We grab some free samples of yogurt and swallow without tasting
Red velvet
We take a wrong turn, or the right turn, and people dissipate into groups
Each with its own tagline and music that rages against particulars
A movement of bodies and minds and body-minds of kids
With their special pens to write special thoughts for their friends
That no smart publisher will publish
Although this is the greatest poetry of the twenty-first century
And further down the wrong or right street the kids of the publishers
Of the editors and the policy makers
These kids paint on apathetic stares ghosts of their realism
But underneath life lies a current that life derives from:
Plates break against the jagged earth creating sea shells resemble faces
They talk and break into smaller pieces until the void becomes vastness
There is a fire in them, I know it, well
I hope
We hear another song come from a peripheral alley:
Babies teeth and masticating dentures
Lick the same foods, milkshakes;
That’s when we see her face and blue dress
She runs from the third world with her voice
Calling to take me and take me underneath
Not to elevate onto some inhuman heaven
But underneath with the workers and the spit
I say I love her
My friends and I leave
On our return down the same lost street we spot her putting away her guitar
And she looks sad but no one cries in the city streets
We save that for French movies
Where we cry for those lost poets
She leaves the black hole that sucked her up for the night
Now the alley is just an alley of no metaphor;
Nothing is serious and everything matters.