Nocturne

( i )

They TP’d the city last night,
Like some drunk hooligans;
It looked magnificently tangled
Against the orange-black backdrop of the sky.
I followed one particular end,
In and out of twisted branches
Of all-night salesman. Hope
Wrapped around giant metal posts;
I was careful to tread like a tight-rope walker,
Passing from billboard to billboard;
And there were others I saw,
Stuck in their own Mobius strip.

( ii )

Night slinks from doorstep to doorstep.
Lipstick stained teeth smile
The grin of an old whore.
The stains, the rays, the remnants of days;
The sun will set at seven seventeen
And the bats are already abroad,
Their crescent bordered shawls, fluttering blindly,
Sniffing out scents of stale fruits and fresh blood
In the warm summer stillness.
Will her stout hooker’s spit dissolve this tint
And the darkness…will it be complete?

( iii )

The irrelevant applicant:

The inevitable young man sits perspiring
On a chair that never sits still, not quite.
Eyeing them, his interlocutors,
With the sudden sharpness of a bird,
And, of course, the polished floor
Where his sole has squealed,
And betrayed him, to his mind,
While he, leaden-lung'd, flutter-stomach
Trades rancid spit, for a rotten rank.
Let the interview commence;
Let them question him on the purpleness of shadows,
On the pungency trapped between his teeth,
And the fatuity of this scene.
The sweaty young man with the walrus mustache:
The pliable, pancake, protégée.
His fat old soul smothered in too much coat;
The clammy excrescence of his sad little century.