The past shifts behind red spray paint:
small but beautiful, if you’d like to see

I take whichever menu is offered
Be polite: buy a drink & you can watch

Voices boil, reduce

My face dips beneath an unknown meridian
& crests out of reach

*

Wind from the desert diverts the boats back to port
Comfort plunges to meet the water’s temperature

Once the divers groped for oysters
Now only pigeons roost in the grotto

Your face, the guide says,
it’s too angry for a pretty girl

Of course I smiled for him
I was a prizefighter in the last town

*

The church of bones is open only for worship
It’s an honor to be interred in a wall

I follow the seam of the Atlantic
through tunnels at low tide
The layman can’t tell what’s God & what’s nature
What I can tell—

Tree: fig, almond
The princess weeping for want of snow

The graffiti says
every day someone drowns in the beautiful water

Return the way I came
An ant carrying a half-burned cigarette back to her queen

*

Change the ending & the position of the tongue:
now you’ve learned a thousand new words

My night-plotline creates heat—
I’m too tired to dance, to claim what is already mine

The dawn streetsweepers will brush it away
Lip on throat the dinghy going down

Beautiful, isn’t it?
Drown in it.