Empty
Secret agent man, they’ve given you a number,
and they’ve taken away you’re name…
“They take away your name,” Mike claims
about the cop he called a pig before running
into me. “Imagine being
called junkie…” “Or just another number,” I add.
“What’d you say about my mother?” Mike growls.
Wrestling himself into his “Romanian spy coat,”
Mike sings some “Secret Agent man,"
as we step into the light of Telegraph
avenue, where a mesmerizing mass
of flesh merges into one, one hundred hands
beating the blues into their own
aluminum or plastic cans, empty
spaghetti colander cymbals, and trash
cans not eyeing heaven for change
but flipped on their rims into drums—
timpanis brimming hipster hymns
sending tie-died angels spinning,
bodies dissolving into song,
men boxing air, wrestling with God,
and nymphs subdued by heroin
sprawled around wooden tables— last supper
saints tonight and ghosts tomorrow,
specters scouring the streets for anything
to sate that old unavoidable void.
We breathe the light of seven hundred suns,
buried deep in the dank empty belly of Blake’s bar,
where no neon angels dance upon the head
of the needle lodged in Mike’s arm
sucking up his muddy life-fluid and filling
his eviscerated veins with visions
as he eyes my empty trembling
on a yellow, worn napkin sprouting blue flowers
of flames. Fumbling for my beer, I tumble
from my stool and stumble up the stairs,
where Mike mumbles something
of our crumbling immutability
and crumples his changeless Pepsi cup,
pointing past a tree’s arms to an Army
sign reading “Be all you can be,”
knowing all we all want is to be
known and full of food and something
true, which no one can take away.
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