The One Moment When Dandelions Don't Die
       

What protects the cellular
neighborhood stays
in the quietest part of a gunshot.

Feet caving in the cardboard tenements,

a weather-shift
in the arrangement of windows,

curtains cringing with sweat as it reddens,

and the crowded air hunted down
to aphorisms dictated
by gang drift.

I can only crawl to the end of my eyes,

a boy tells the ground
when he wants it no longer there.

The horizon patrolled by traffic helicopters
heard from the bullet dying
in the boy's video splices of skin.

Only when the coat struggling
in the trash showed him
the crumbs of a dollar did he think
to carry it home to his blaring step-kitchen.

"Did you change the sunlight?
What the hell did you do
to the sunlight?" his mother yells
while he tries to pick his blood off the floor—
the blood is fake for now, recorded in leaking turntables.

A dandelion of no poetic intelligence
moves the breeze
and the cities within the breeze.

The boy still scattered in the harshly-moving,
never-talked-about slug song.

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Copyright © 2017 Rob Cook All rights reserved
from Last Window in the Punk Hotel Last Window in the Punk Hotel
Rain Mountain Press
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission