City Cider

              Parched city blacktop leads 

              past the busker playing hard blues 

              outside the hardware store today. I push through

              the old wooden doors for plumber’s putty

              to seal the lurking drain. 

              Hard city bouncing, living wooden stairs,

              internet saturation, dripping spigots make

              water circles stain the easy wood floor.

              I wonder about these old red brick

              apartment walls, if they might alarm

              the room with their odd uneven

              mortar sections missing. This

              is no factory, no random city strain. We simply

              sit and listen over traffic on headphones

              while the city boom unveils.

              A city man flops below in a happy feathered suit,

              hawks glossy turkey coupons like last year
              to the whole wide street; likens his own

              false wisdom to daybreak; makes a few

              dark moves toward drivers with their cars turned down;

              keeps a little booze close to his bottled brown heart

              to keep himself from fading all in.

              After the turkey man I start to notice street signs

              and naked trees scratching rhythm to stretch the time.

              Dark finger limbs close in on winter sketches.

              Branches shake their black stubs empty and down low,

              reach up to erase the oiled rusty sky.

              Overhead again the train rackets by, passes quickly,

              brings the only calm to every city’s real dark dreams.

              At the holiday we’ll drink hard apple cider together

              into our phones, slough off our own difficult

              words, exchange photos with meaning this time,

              text outside the windows with whole grammar to

              reach for long gratitude, a sense of genuine art, deep friendship. I’ll

              slip a piece of glossy paper under my drink

              the way you used to do to prevent water rings

              from marrying the wood 

              and wonder what else
              you must be doing somewhere.