Faceless

A tour guide through your robbery 
He also is

Cigarette saying, “look what I did about your silence.”

Ransom water and box spring gold
            -This decade is only for accent grooming, I guess

Ransom water and box spring gold
                        -The corner store must die

War games, I guess

All these tongues rummage junk

The start of mass destruction
Begins and ends
In restaurant bathrooms
That some people use
And other people clean

“you telling me there’s a rag in the sky?”
-waiting for you. yes-

we’ve written a scene
we’ve set a stage

We should have fit in. warehouse jobs are for communists. But now more corridor and hallway have walked into our lives. Now the whistling is less playful and the barbed wire is overcrowded too.

My dear, if it is not a city, it is a prison. 
If it has a prison, it is a prison. Not a city.

When a courtyard talks on behalf of military issue,
all walks take place outside of the body.

Dear life to your left
Medieval painting to your right
None of this makes an impression

Crop people living in thin air
You got five minutes 
to learn how to see 
through this breeze

When a mask goes sideways,
Barbed wire becomes the floor
Barbed wire becomes the roof
Forty feet into the sky 
becomes out of bounds

When a mask breaks in half, 
mind which way the eyes go.


They’ve killed the world for the sake of giving everyone the same backstory

We’re watching Gary, Indiana fight itself into the sky

Old pennies for wind. For that wind feeling you get before the hood goes up and over your headache. Pennies that stick together (mocking all aspirations). Stuck together pennies was the first newspaper I ever read. Along with the storefront dwelling army that always lets us down.

Where the holy spirit favors the backroom. Souls in a situation that offer one hundred ways to remain a loser. Souls watching the clock hoping that eyes don’t lie to sad people.

“what were we talking about again?”
the narrator asked the graveyard
-ten minutes flat-
said the graveyard
-the funeral only took ten minutes-
“never tell that to anyone again,”
the narrator severely replied

“You just going to pin the 90s on me?”
-all thirty years of them-
“Then why should I know the difference between sleep and satire?”

            the pyramid of corner stores fell on our heads
                        -we died right away

            that building wants to climb up and jump off another building
                        -these are downtown decisions
           
                                    somewhere on this planet, it is august 7th 

and we’re running down the rust thinking, “one more needs to come with me”

“What evaporated on earth, so that we could be sent back down?”

A conductor of minds
            In a city-wide symphony
            Waving souls to sing
            He also is

Credit

From Heaven is all Goodbyes (City Lights Publishers, 2017) by Tongo Eisen-Martin. Copyright © 2017 Tongo Eisen-Martin. Reprinted by permission of the author.