Star-conqueror, doom-swallower
finds just that little warmth,
a shard of milkstone,
like waking in an anthropologist’s paradise,
junkyard praised by another name.
All around are words on lintels,
sacred texts picked apart,
darkness very like a spark.
Those one reads are sacred
even out of context,
an apple a day keeping Cortez away,
mulling his damp maps.
How long now till wait becomes
run, then hide, then grass
and brand new identity?
A taste for blood may carry the day
and the man with the numbers
talk himself hoarse, give up hope,
reach for the smothering pillow.
Urb’s dark angel, aggressive as a
noontime drunk, passing counterfeit
zeroes spiced with jealousy’s jaguar.
His leggy laughing moll, wet-handed doxy,
chats up the dahlia-visored, Aztec-headed men.
Draped in a flow, choreographed
to a sprawl up and down the cyclists’ ramp,
it would take one of their own to tell them apart.
What did the guidebook say,
among its cheap digs,
about not getting your hopes up?
In a time of heroes,
garbage tends to pile up.