I am off to make a church bell out of a bank window

“kitchens meant
more to the masses
back in the day”

and before that?

“we had no enemy”

somewhere in america
the prison bus is running on time

you are going to want
to lose that job
before the revolution hits

I won’t be home for breakfast.
Everyone out here now knows my name.
And I won’t be turned against for at least four months.

-The cop in the picket line is a hard working rookie.
-The sign in my hand is getting more and more laughs
(something about a numb tumble).

-The picket line got cops in it.

“I can take care of
these windows for you,
but someone else
has to go in your gas tank”

was clear to the man that
rich people had talked too much this year

go ahead and throw down that marble park bench
everyone is looking up at,
 you know,
get the Romans out of your mind

Maybe a good night’s sleep
would have changed
The last twenty years of my life

-Playing an instrument
Is like punching a wall-

What would you have me do?
Replace the population?
Give brotherhood back to the winter?
Stop smoking cigarettes with the barely dead?

They listen in on the Sabbath

Police called the police on me
-a white candlestick beneath my detention

“I’ve ruined the soup again,”
thought the judge
as he took off his pilgrim robe
behind a white people’s door (and more)

“I didn’t get lucky. I got
what was coming to me,”
he toasts

“fight me back,”
the man says, of course, to himself

washing windows with a will to live
tin can on his left shoulder
enjoying the bright brand new blight
with all partygoers
(both supernatural and supernaturally down to earth)

what, is this elevator traveling side to side?

Like one thousand bitter polaroid pictures you actually try to eat
All the furniture on this street is nailed to the cement
Cheap furniture, but we have commitment

This morning, an essay opens the conversation between enemies
“why, because you control every gram of processed sugar
between here and a poor man’s border?”
“because in the tin can on my left shoulder
I can hear the engines of deindustrialization?”

-You should get into painting,
You know,
Tell lies deeply-

I’m rooting for the traitor this month

Carting cement to my pillow… “here we will build”

“Tongo is high again. Not talking much.
Twenty movie casts later. Light hearted, I guess.”

Climb the organ pipe up to our apartment floor

“Tongo is high again. Calling everything church.
Singing along to the courtyard.”

Thanks to a horn player’s holy past time

“Tongo is at the store.”

Old enough to know everything the floor tile knows

“Tongo decided only flat un-swept things inside can talk.”

Climb up to the rustiest nail

“Tongo is in the room reading again.”

-Put a real jacket on it
Talk about a real five years-

Keep memories like these
In my pocket
Next to the toll receipt

a man lost a wager
with the god of good causes,
you know,
stood up for himself
a little too late
(maybe too early)

I can still see
Twenty angles of his jaw
Zig zagging through
The cold world
Of deindustrialization

“art to it,” I will tell my closest friends one day