opens. Sandbox spoons, wind-chimes, lost dimes
detonate. Softly, they go. Softly,
the sprinklers in the neighbor's roses
wheel in the direction of the abyss.
Now, the bed lamps are waking.
All the old people at this hour waking,
feeling their exile. They shut blinds, softly,
as a drunken veteran drags himself away, dimes
and nickles spilling out his unbuttoned pants, roses
tattooed on his ass: he was trying to piss into the abyss
from his wheelchair at midnight.
Now, in silent fire birches shine, the midnight
streets empty, sidewalks waking;
there the borrowed light of roses;
there the tree-house nails glint like dimes;
all the silver playground slides against the sky's abyss
gleam like waterfalls in dreams. Softly,
a siren in the distance sifts the air and softly
fades. In a window, silhouetted by the night-
light, a mother lifts her infant up in supplication. Waking,
the child grasps her hair; they disappear. The abyss
still there, dangling stars like tarnished dimes
above the roof. Now, the roses
hang their defeated heads; a rose is
only what the light says it is. While cats, amid night's
onslaught, slip by, thin with lust, their waking
eyes feral and astral, hovering above the dime-
drop radiator spills, which sweet poison they lick. Softly,
they creep, and die, unwitting, in some alley abyss
beneath a garage. O hour of onslaught, abyss
near, moon strafing the skirts of sleep. O midnight,
barrage swelling turquoise kiddy-pools, roses
calicified, windows kindled, the disturbed waking.
All the hurt ones rising wearily, softly
stepping into slippers. Gathering dimes
to pay newsboys coming with the dawn. O hour when nothing
remains: birdsong, midnight's soft abyss become a pinkish sky,
dimes taken, envelope in the roses, still scroll of the news flung down.