"There's no pilot light" the singer said,   "but nights like these still burn." I laid   across newspapers ripped and spread   and stabbed like signposts through my bed   until a symphony of laughter sped   up to sound like violins   lured me to the open window.      I stared through buildings painted blue   and bathed in buttermilk. The moon   hovered like an empty room   I could have spent a lifetime in.   But even stronger was the cobblestone   chorus, like a siren's moan   crying "give the street your skin, kid."      But my smokestack eyes withholding rain, oppose   another burning wheatfield full of crows.      The magnifying glass is lost or misplaced,   so take this portrait from outer space.   See how the monument swallows the speck of dust   while the weathervane powders the roof with rust,   until the whole junkyard's riddled ruin   and the story of the heart's communion   is like the leaf of dew that tried to drink the typhoon?      A bullet backed out of a gun   a ray of light pierces the sun.   Rewind the film and see the frightened run   straight into the den of the crouching lion,   holding hands and smiling. Once   you're there you pray for lightning.   Lazarus, you are free now to die again.      And cassocks flowing from head to toe, conceal   the bruises and the burns from where we kneel.      A match scratching a wall devours   the darkness for a moment and tires   or so many past flickering futures   and has the decency to disappear,   while thieves and aimless gypsy bands   keep and polish the queen's silver hands   saying "the life we cannot touch, we choose to feel."      "War is the horror Peace anesthetized,"   the oracle's iron lungs decried.   "The slings and stones we keep asleep inside."   Meanwhile headless corpses take no sides,   spastic banners carve up the skies,   and the translator's gifted tongue decides   just where the difference between two opposites lies.   Is it in the pocket mirror where every tear is rehearsed   or in the soaring bird's eye view of the scorched earth?      I thought if I could curl into a ball and roll   out of my skin I'd discover a soul   instead of a scaffold around an impulse.   I looked for a target but found a scarecrow   which swallowed anything I fet it whole   until I had nothing left but vestigal   memories, redolent and rainsoaked.      And that's when I finally reached the egg   where I couldn't think or feel or beg   to be reformed or reborn. Instead   I pecked, lurched, cracked, clawed, and bled   and emerged blind and raw to feed once more   on a mystery unfulfilled   where every answer waves within a sea of riddles.      And the cicadas forever throb on the fringes of the lens   while I dance upon this shifting pile of skeletons.