Poem: Midnight On the Bridge

 

Midnight On the Bridge

 

near a dunce-cap cone of light

an occasional car

slingshots down bottomless

highway,

 

the drivers not urgent

to find out how roofs

fell to populate the earth:

how some noble ideal had crowded itself

and shattered.

 

a mind is a molecule,

the city thick with them.  so many swarm

that only collective purpose

combines to matter.

 

the chemical pulls

that bond us in grids

are also the traps that encase us

alone.

 

you can write about it on paper, on your arm,

in blood, or into the ghost-ocean of a screen.

god did this for a reason,

you could state. 

 

but the ekg

that the angels watch,

while listening to prayers,

is the New York Stock Exchange.

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This poem was originally published in Halfway Down the Stairs in 2014.  I am republishing past poems for I feel it could all end soon.  I am old. I am experiencing grief at the steep decline of the USA.  My heart literally twangs, now and then.  And I have no money or insurance to see a doctor.