Breaking
The holy light of loneliness
shines within a single cell,
lit up across the alley tonight
in the block-long grid of hallways,
garages and apartment doors.
A boy, sixteen, has hung a quilt
across the span of the single garage,
and placed a red bulb in the socket.
Music bounces off the walls
and concrete sends up chords.
The sound crashes against limits,
grows huge and slams the air.
In the hot night, in a room
without windows, he rides
a three-foot board and throws himself
against the wall, to perfect
a mastery, a somersault in air
that will return his body
to the earth still flying.
He breaks his flight and falls,
and retreats, and returns again.
In dimensions of twelve by eighteen,
in the cave of his faith, hot and red,
with strange music for food, he tests
his soul, and slams his body,
his bone-jutting, fragile, boy's
shoulders, down hard on cement,
and rising does not weep,
or even hesitate, again.
Hearing Voices
At night under the apartment kitchen,
two men are speaking. I slice
the yellow cheese, pour water for tea,
standing in my shirt, bare-legged
on the sea swirl of linoleum.
The voices below are steady and private.
Relaying their private news, they flow
out through the night in many directions:
slowly through the curtains pulled
across the screen, across and past me,
entering the white slab walls.
