Beetlebung and Kettlehole--April Poems

Keeping It Molten

Back in the vast city. I’m nowhere and everywhere,
tunnels, canals, tankers, taxis, slums, skyscrapers
webbed, veined, and no skin transparent.
Crooks and junkies in this dark metropolis?
But no, only phantoms smelling of fish
ghosts from a graphic story--singed, somber
and tragically misread—still hiding
in the tenements of my mind.

This city has been a bloody slaughterhouse
littered with noise, and I still writhe
in a corner park, watching
the 59th street bridge with steel biceps
where she once said they met in secret
and broke all circuits inside me, and
voiceless I screamed underground poetry
to inflame the avenues in my roiled solitude
igniting the Hudson River.


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Prompt: underlying emotion you never name