Stop Sign

Stop sign in a dark puddle
Headlights burn magnesium
Cut the day from night
Splash the moon into drops

Drown the planned trip in the water, in the street
Hold it under the tires, down to the road bed, tired

Night rills leak toward the drain while I watch
Dreams drying on my ankles, underfoot
Until it curls around my ankles, velvet black
Old rims and headlights gathered
In the rubber of its collar--who gives a night cat
A thing of junk and rubbish?

Then the lights flare, metal sparks memories
And the night purrs and waits for more of my magic:
My next disappearance, my next galvanized thought
Shocking through my skin
Thinning oil along gears
I can hear clicking through my head
Like nails across the kitchen tile
A circus of spinning dogs cut from memory
Pasted on the shaft driving the center ring
Twirling, dancing--as if we run on Remember (TM)

All our days decompose into tar--maybe it's the tears,
Maybe it's the skin--and are refined
Into high-grade Nostalgia (TM) that burns like alcohol,
Limelight cocktails fire at the edge of the sawdust
In the black that smells restless, like petrol

I'm sure those other lives splayed
In a rainbow across the puddle I shattered
Into night slivers of moon and cat and dress and wand
That cling and watch and tremble

What card did I flip when I turned that corner?

Sharing with Poets United and  The Sunday Muse. Tomorrow there is a rally in the city to which we are a suburb that was sold as if there would be monster trucks and free toys for the kids instead of monster opinions running rampant. This has nothing to do with the poem, per se...it's just that at times it feels as if my perspective darkens and shifts--seeing incipient violence in the innocent cheering for a local team as if every time we're encouraged to support the colors and cheer is a lesson in how to keep the monsters satisfied with bloody roars instead of blood. So...yeah. What exactly do we run on and from and toward in the night?

-- Chrissa