After
My Car Is Totaled In A Rockslide
My throat sleeps like an avalanche
With modems & social workers
Vaccinating the homeless in tunnels
Filled with drums & fire escapes.
In my knees mechanics inspect flowers
&
Gas tanks on lifts made of violins.
Behind the lacquered red toolboxes of
my legs
An unshaven astronomer chases one-eyed
pigeons
Through
alleys of glamorous & sullen tires.
Windshields shatter in my gloves.
My ankles are manuscripts made of
radiators
& the
casings of split-open transmissions
Bent like half-folded wheelchairs
creaking
With all the demons of my wrongdoings
Rising through the floorboards.
My teeth are tiles from the roofs of
Suicide bombers exploding straight up
& the
rocks that fall upon the highway
Crush the cellular telephones of my
wrists.
Vail Pass
11 March 1996
[Published in The Dance Of Yellow Lightning Over The
Ridge:
Poems 1993-1997. © 1998 by Jim Cohn.]
APPEARS IN
The Dance Of Yellow Lightning Over The Ridge: Poems 1993-1997
(Writers & Books Publications, 1998)