The Afterthought

I feel the need to keep track of everything because every moment is lost but the now and now I must recall a past in a concrete slab that I can’t write messages in because it is cold and hard by now. 

I can’t go back. 

I can’t go back to that exact place, with that exact feeling, those smells, that garden, those birds, that phone line. 

I can only be here. 

So I need to make here a better here.

These tunnels are castle corridors: only the royal feet rest on royal rugs atop royal wheels on their royal truck.

And I am a guest in their land of nodding heads,

With the bottles that measure the price of the morning’s dusk licked smear of a sunrise.

They do not paint the walls, no, they splatter and spit on them, they cut their palms and rub their hand along the border of them.

The curvature causes words to bend and morph from those adjacent to those that stretch and scrawl above us.

Our metropolitan royalty will tell you the truth.

In sanskrit, in Spanish, with door in the face tactics and benchwarmer advantage.

There is no unintelligible canvas, just revolutionary action or lack thereof, just hot coal beneath hot colors that are burning from the sun.

Our lady queen walks the walls where her royalty have shed their skins on.

Our queen babylove kisses the street signs separating sidewalks.

And only on sleepwalks does she wander through their tunnels,

Where suddenly the colors come to with broken down bricks painted stop sign red,

And beige buttons up to peanut butter butterscotch ears on baby’s head.

And we know nothing of the grey murmurs that used to mutter marvelous memories of times past as we drove past the tunnel of spray painted artifact.

I wish my commute to school could be a part of that.