Eduardo del Valle

¬(99% = 1%)

soon the honey
in unripe pods
unlike black locust

depleting my stay—could be in the coming ebb of any morning's noontide—an abiding Cimmerian shade of late summering days awakening senses aflame through them not fully out-of-place in quasi-laissez-faire necktie hardhat safety-orange vest and Sahara-soled boots I tread by quiet gasps taking in the colloidal fusion of bacteria-consumed sweat and gushing gusts blowing off the heaving thunderhead now swelling in the midst of corporate Euclidian shapes and shady pinks of gritty granite and smooth marble and hard Saturnian mums bubbling in planters under shadow shades rising from under a dome of canopying boughs and yellowing leaves

jet skies
silent on mullioned
glass curtain walls

it's theirs down here and theirs up there who're watching out of/from an archeology sinking high in the air and mine me now coming out of the trees onto pasteboard-lettered pavers and into the street crossing it at the corner 'round Sam's falafel cart reaching the angular shadows on the other side as an attentive tourist with eyeballs trained and craned up the well-honed hulls hovers behind me exhaling excesses of life onto me the plebian cords drum heads and plasticized brass breaking smoking up the rigors of slick architectural planes who deny sky to us ghosts of the lesser-centile-livings here in the world below

clouds hanging on
parapets—so blasé
with themselves