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To David Krump's previous piece

Steady, Center

These things that are lost, I remember them too:
The yellow underwear you wore when menstruating,
The sexual hairpins on your childhood white dresser
Stained with nail polish, and the sticky ghosts of
half-removed
Boy band stickers.  
Is everything outgrown, a volumish saulting outgrowth
of itself,
Which like a mouthful of tincture cabernet sinks dryly
towards the center of the self?
Half lowly now, I remember your mallow aspects-cheeks,
lips, thighs, breasts-
The way one could sink into any of them like white,
blush
La Brea.
The area on your hand, the siren region between your
thumb and index, like
A lost mammoth, I find myself twisting in it, and I'm
so fucking hairy
But
The breathing I hear now is not my own; it is the
puppy dreaming of 
Steady incense snakes and Shiny Buddha Bellies. 
Something mallow he finds in these things.
Sometimes, the sound, the breathing, it is the street
and I watch it swell and lull.
A conceited coupon, escaped from an old woman's purse,
saults his way on by, 
Offering in orange 35cents off, but off what?
The eye of a potato, the very strange sexuality
Of a banana, the pitiable nature of collected things?
I don't want to say it, but I've told myself I would
be honest before I leave.
It is sadly discomforting, now that I too am 
a collected, a preserved.  Flip open the lid to your
ballerina box-there I am.  
Stacks of blacks and whites, a few colored, smiling in
one costume or another-Hamlet, Clyde,
George-Friendly-Bailey.
And who will see these now that I am a piece in
such a private collection, like Van Gogh's Starry
Night, 
which some bastard bought and hasn't held a public
viewing of in more than thirty-four years.  But I am
not a Van Gogh, I am reminder of an extramarital
ejaculation that occurred twenty three years ago. 
It's something like your mother said
to the four year old version of you
in the toy store.
"No, Honey, choose this dolly.  It opens its eyes when
you pick it up."
I'm at the train station and 
Van Gogh's vicious minstrel 
sweeps everywhere: the platform, the alley ways, the
undersides 
of Graffiti Bridge.  
The train station-it's a little known out 
from this riverside blackhole.  And the blackhole
crushes, compacts, 
until eventually everything is central.  
J.A., Yeats, the center, well, this is where and what
it is, 
right here and growing 
and I'm leaving for Chicago.  In anticipation, I put
my ear to the 
bent track, and hear it, all of it there: 
the train, the heavy breathing of the black hole, 
that tragic classical tinkling sound 
from her distanced ballerina box.  I'm leaving with a
black plastic bag 
taped, doubled up and stuffed with my jeans, 
my canvas, two leather belts, one brown, one black. 
But my essentials, 
a pack of roll your owns, 
a picture of myself in a red Donald Duck T-shirt, 
a felonious amount of marijuana and my libido, 
find themselves haphazardly packed in a downtown 
wrought iron garbage can.  
And, since you asked quite politely, the stars, yes, 
they're coming too.  

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