Thoughts in a Cafeteria

I.

Maybe it’s that
the one
who does the killing
keeps you alive
in the
meantime.

A nurse. A glad, pale nurse
you never see again.

There is no killer
without that
killer
patting your heart
to keep it beating
in
the night; without
that killer waving hello or massaging
your troubled brain.
Blessing you
with
hands
made out of grass.

You are taught lessons
in the heat of summer. These
lessons
are like baths of
cool water:

On your lifespan, your
need to
love and be loved, how to spell it,
how
to hold on to it.

II.

Then there are the faces
in the glass
reading
books or magazines,
waiting on busses, pushing elevator
buttons
and strollers, damning
their own children for fictitious crimes.
Violent men and desperate women.
The lonely and
the
out-of-time.

There are the folks who read the paper
out loud to hear some
voice
of reason.

There are those with their arms in slings
waiting alone
in
the dark to heal. With prescriptions,
essays on hell, the best way
to care
for an orchid. Listening
to tiny choruses
gracing
miniscule graves.

Ants in the cracks of diamonds,
cigarettes
in the hands of
unemployed
angels.

III.

Feed and wait.
Breathe in and wait to breathe out.
Marry and wait. Pray in
flea voices
over ten dollar breakfasts
and wait.

Moving down the line
with trays of grapefruit, oranges,
yogurt, breakfast pastries. The scent
of suspicion; they are
missing
in their own minds.

IV.

The executioner leans
on the lever.
He is a retired bookie
with an
owl heart and dysentery.

His own burial plot is wider
than ours.

Full of his nameless
predecessors. Their birthdays
are
our birthdays, their deaths
tell
the future in messages
of stones.

And there is no cure.
There is no cure for the body
you’ve been given. The
mind and spirit.

There is only the sun’s radiation as it bids you good morning,
the close hum of
decrepit
bones, the insignias
of
lost men. White-
faced, blue-eyed, whiskered
and
shaking
in front of the shaving
mirror.

Glowing partially in their own eyes, and partially
in a new time, a new fatherhood, new
action. We all have them,
every one of them
inside
of us more than halfway flickering.

Believing someone good was supposed to be waiting, that someone
took us from
our real homes. We must have been
kidnapped.

V.

The cemetery grows hair
in between the slabs. The cold beds.
Roots grow

into our cellars and
carry our bones
on
even deeper. Further

down. Disassemble

them and pound
them

underneath us,
underneath our land

like
joyous drums.