Daily Poem: April 13

Soho



Everyone in the city looks like they’re foraging for stones.
Surgical scars raked in brutal arcs
down the dark globes of cheeks,
cysts behind our ears, yellow fingernails.

I close my eyes and the phosphenes say,
“You bought this heart attack, like everything.”

The hesitant, hermetic doors,
a lute-like instrument
strummed lazily for dollars—Humanity  

is a kicked stone
skittering panicked across the driveway.

What else and what all the world
of the whole, disagreeable self
flows hissing like swift arrows of people.

You didn’t see
the faces of strangers for so long
and now,