Oh Rickety.
Was all he said
Oh Rickety angels, of oh Rickety night
Bent over the bannisters, the coffins, the L-Train, the bent men in mosques upon mosques upon Ottomans, upon bannisters. Oh Rickety

The boy racing, racing, racing up to the bottleneck. Senses more than scattered. Senses wrecked. Senses divorced. Senses left.

And on that night he saw that the stars were dying, fading, twinkling shut. And he laughed and took another sip of childhood.

Such unholy parchment, such unholy ink, such holy words

I've run out of closets to shove my monsters back into. And my fingers are handguns that break holy words like they were collateral damage
to the war that I've fought for seventy years.
to the one I begin today

And the marble, etched, broken into beauty. Much as how love was always meant to be. Pain.

Oh Rickety, he went on. Oh Rickety stardust, oh Rickety eternity, oh Rickety gods

oh Rickety men.

What's infinity, he asks.

Love, he answers to himself in the dark. Preaching beneath the cones of dusty light, twisting like the once great roads of America, over the plains of Wyoming, over the great train yards of Pittsburgh and the steel mills of Detroit. And the preacher stands idly by while the churchyards turn a shade of green.

The boy runs his hands in a pool of his mother's afterbirth hoping to find in the old something he'd forgotten.

Only books and scars will tell you such things. She once said that.

So he wrote pages into his arms, a saga of breath and time, and he breathed in the Potomac and spat out Allegheny.

And I don't want to scare the birds away anymore. My life is written in red ink.

Oh Rickety

He was a star without a constellation.

I'm going home now.

Our shadows don't live until we turn on the light

The Town Nympho blindfolds the streets and pushes over the signs.