An open door says, “Come in.” A shut door says, “Who are you?” Shadows and ghosts go through shut doors. If a door is shut and you want it shut, why open it? If a door is open and you want it open, why shut it? Doors forget but only doors know what it is doors forget.
Tonite I walked out of my red apartment door on East tenth street’s dusk— Walked out of my home ten years, walked out in my honking neighborhood Tonite at seven walked out past garbage cans chained to concrete anchors Walked under black painted fire escapes, giant castiron plate covering a hole in ground —Crossed the street, traffic lite red, thirteen bus roaring by liquor store, past corner pharmacy iron grated, past Coca Cola & Mylai posters fading scraped on brick Past Chinese Laundry wood door’d, & broken cement stoop steps For Rent hall painted green & purple Puerto Rican style
I have not used my darkness well, nor the Baroque arm that hangs from my shoulder, nor the Baroque arm of my chair. The rain moves out in a dark schedule. Let the wind marry. I know the creation continues through love. The rain’s a wife. I cannot sleep or lie awake. Looking at the dead I turn back, fling
In flat America, in Chicago, Graceland cemetery on the German North Side. Forty feet of Corinthian candle celebrate Pullman embedded lonely raisin in a cake of concrete. The Potter Palmers float in an island parthenon. Barons of hogfat, railroads and wheat
I walk the purple carpet into your eye carrying the silver butter server but a truck rumbles by, leaving its black tire prints on my foot and old images the sound of banging screen doors on hot afternoons and a fly buzzing over the Kool-Aid spilled on the sink flicker, as reflections on the metal surface.
Here, in the room of my life the objects keep changing. Ashtrays to cry into, the suffering brother of the wood walls, the forty-eight keys of the typewriter each an eyeball that is never shut, the books, each a contestant in a beauty contest,
I am rounded, billowed out, hunched like you; I am big like you, ugly and beautiful; Eternal like you. I have set my body solidly upon the earth, to confront all; My head to the sky, the sky on my shoulders, Feet rooted in the earth's depths as mountains are rooted. Nothing can sweep over me to remove me; This life in me is ancient, shall go down to the last days,
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