Comcast gleaming watching scuttling scarabs dance down
wide moneyed rivers forded through glassy gorges
People, people everywhere! brushing reading
begging sleeping ascending waiting,
so much waiting, we all wait, all die
in this city of 1.5 million, shrinking,
how can we blame hesitation to write?
decades frittered skimming a flat rock
go down Broad up Germantown go underneath
the Schuylkill wind up an overwhelmed trekker
in backwoods Kensington, asking
where did that build go so scattered and wrong


II.

Find the one arched window
above that beer bodega
(that lone cigarette after that lone sex
on that lone May night that lonely
year when you were only in love)
he sits, watches, cordons off
an archipelago of shaded earth
where one feigned tan sits
like dimples, just her, dapples the sun
she is moving through,
moving to wait maybe
to die, and so much
like some novel about life
pared and minced
all down to
(inhale)
A