Something about street lamps
....incarcerates my loneliness –
........like bars their electric light blocks
access to the freedom of darkness
....talking down to me with all
........the nation’s technical savoir-faire,
stern envoys of contingencies
....flaunting scientific and federal power
........over my eternally mistaken identity.
They say that there are stars
....unseen beyond the vile glare
........shining for eons – now in vain.
I walk the gauntlet of their gazes
....at the saturation point of thoroughfares
........squinting as if in an interrogation room
while civilization’s cruel and false light
....illuminates the astonished weeds
........abducted from their home: darkness.
Like the weeds I am resigned to
....the sting intrinsic to events
........one with all that is ignored –
a dead birch leaf falling
....unseen from its tree –
........a lost button –
a wrinkle in a bedspread –
....one with all that is coveted,
........feared, mistaken, remembered
when the sun rises
....and the street lamps are turned off.
