I wandered out of childhood’s snow dusk streetlights,

Buffalo solo, trying to get lost, looking for some time

some place to escape into.

 Was anything they told us actual?

Was life just a list of tasks and tests?

 Was I just a dart in someone’s game?

Are our truths only what we distained unlearning?

                                       *

Serial lives lived  in the same body, our names

should change as we age, reflecting our progress,

revealing our fuck-ups, the places we had to flee.

The police may have persons of interest,

the church its assertions & predrawn conclusions.

You and I have only our suspicions, a sense of

where the edge should be, where the end begins.

*

Arrested for raping a robot

he hired the hottest chatbot attorney.

*

That old story, the fine print of life

consent the solitary issue.

Who schedules your weather?  

Did anyone ask for your absentee vote?

*

Isn’t it complex enough already?

The robot had a faithful android dog

infested with transistor fleas & a

venomous bite, who recorded it all.

*

A hung jury.

*

Just after five, the sun has been down almost an hour.  It did not warm above freezing

today. The delivered supermarket lilies start to open. I guess I could invent some other,

earlier TGIF to occupy.  Maybe not—nostalgia as useful as a vagrant’s zip code tattoo.

*

I associate places with things that fly—this coast gulls, California willets and sandpipers,

Hudson Valley bald eagles, Pago Pago fruit bats and airborne coconut beetles.  Here in

the village the air space has been empty all day, and everything murmurs pointlessness.

*

Despair is the church’s ultimate sin.  It’s also crazy, like getting pissed off at fresh dusk

or celebrating what our senses censor—that sound of wings in the sudden darkness.