~This poem previously appeared in The Northridge Review (1997).
Express Train Boogie-oogie(Read left to right, and also verticality down indentations)
As the station recedes its lights blister
Into raindrop halfglobes
Wet tracks shuttle the eye
From path to path
Now the whole city is revealed gleaming
Fishnet of light pulling in lives
Along the avenue painted numbers
And panting engines flash into mind
Little balls of light the wind pulls
Across the glass like taffy
And now the train slides out of town
Into a flowering darkness
Here's the warehouse district and Club 333
A dark industrial geometry
Dragging trails of signs and coinage
Across billboards
Yellow fireflies packed in a jar
Burst their bulbs
Black trees and leaves in a black sea shivering
Before they drown
People make random gestures
A ragged man pasted on a bench
Where money mates with anatomy
Through the panting interiors
The windowsquares of well‑lit lives
Peer through orchids and seaweed
Greenlit pines lining an empty block
Of grey concrete parking lot
The thousand faces of a movie crowd
Burst through the borders of my body
Of triple‑X theaters
And out the red velvet EXIT
Here are plunging lovers behind half‑drawn curtains
And a woman's silent O as her mouth yawns open
A rainwet warehouse redslicked with rust
Long streets climb a hill and spill
Where metal streamlines clash and overlap
Against a canvas sky painted black
Someone looking up from his written pad
Windows like the slow frames of a film
Through my reflected body
Shining like the tines of a fork
As carload after carload of light
Flickers and is eaten whole