Assault on Precinct 13

Please come in, this town is closed. Roadblocks cinch the arteries,

cars forget their meaning. The motionless Buick is a house

abandoned. The empty houses are the offices

of the priests and the dead. Where are all the people? Open up

the steeple. Who needs the church when hands are gods, each one

stricken with palsy, arthritic knots, muscular memories

of how easy it was to pull a trigger or strangle open a jar?

The police are absent. The criminals are ghosts. We remember

the phone book and the phone booth and the phone

as comforting as a breast without its body. We hold ourselves

up against the concrete wall. We fit inside the stains

of those who came before. This is not a city of the dead

but of the dying. Beautiful doctor, architect of the body,

demand your fee in advance, these coins that were our eyes,

these sewer lids, open now, rendering our bodies into the sky.

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Copyright © 2011 Andrew Kozma All rights reserved
from Cave Wall
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission