PUNKSLIED

PUNKSLIED

Why should young May make a run for November,
its sidewalks where bills glued to newsstands
rage polis and hard-core, gall and fear,
where cars swoosh past and rattle

sounds like bones turning charcoal gray from inside--
not branches scratching easterly winds
in Deutchland, but echoes recognized
by May, who rushes on?  In

her cold water digs in the cold-water district,
its one window, this gives out on walls
spray-painted dripping by anarchists.
There she tends the black flowers

her spray-bottle drowned.  This is her becoming,
more ill than plants and white as bread,
she's coughing when ambulances sing
hymns to the adult, blank sky,

and she finds things: books, smokes, the broke universe:
one razor blade's glint makes the half moon,
parents screwed up tight are sky and earth,
and buses moan, grown old,

sigh exhaust which is not the north wind even
that chilled romantic Deutchland and hummed,
to please old men, Death and the Maiden.
Nothing's green, it's all governed,

and she and the boy must jump each other's bones
in the cemetery, beyond the law,
but frozen as oldsters, to the bone.
November is what they howl.

Jack Hayes
© 2010