It is bright.

Sunlight casts warm tints into the kitchen. White trim on the sun exposed window. The wall around the sink is a darker yellow, implying rustic familiarity. Someone's vision of what home looks like or what we would recognize as what a home is when being filmed. Water is running in the sink.

The camera tightens its lens, telescoping to the hand entering the drain. Smash cut. The switch is made known implying a garbage disposal. The forearm is rooting. disembodied voice grunts. We understand searching. The elbow twists intimating the movement of wrists and fingers. We are acutely aware gears and blades. We are reminded of the switch. There is no music. There isn't any when you need it.

No longer of the unknown hours and alleyway short cuts
not of the memorized path
No trundling through the empty places between squatting plum bricks,
awash in the piecemeal constructed dusk around the corner,
the cold copper pink lamplight from days of industry
feet clopping knowing your shadow only
as it pushed a barrier to the others encroaching
Erected apex predator through an arched spine (eyes beneath the hood)
After the revelers went to echo behind
The empty city and the bus stop sleepers underneath their piles
the crosswalk a full block wide
and movement was untethered

but daylight has gentled and that lie no longer holds
now, learning to sleep without sirens and distant trains

Make amends with it.
Give it the time to caress you.
Let it guide you, grip you by the ribs and compress the diaphragm,
tracing your abdominal muscles, hitching a ride on the sighs you expel.
Deeply now and breath back in, catch it before it drifts too far. it has this home in you.
Bend like this
and know.

Make my headstone from pothole rubble
Leave me curbside with the recycling
Let me wash back into the mechanism
Sanitized for secondary use
Cut out a plot for me from the snow compacted dead leaves
Thick with ancillary moisture stacking it's play
name that place for my trespasses
the wet autumnal shallow
Bedding for the plastic bottles and cigarette packs, third hand coffee tables
folded neatly arms
I will attempt not to dry out too quickly with the tree line cover
I will last this time to be buried
engage with the detritus roots
Smell the wet stone corners.
where the slabs cup their hands for a drink, porous
and the damp sits in its deepest slouch.
eroded past and possibility evaporating.
It permeates like smoke in hair
permanent to our pliable under-pinning
This street tilts south steeply
Many of these house sit on a hill but sit one story
It will be long months til I twist and husk
somewhere that lasts too long

down the old wires flailing from the grommet.
Radiating the raw vein of copper twinkling, circulating the walls, circumnavigating the request. Drooping webs in the tree line cradling there slackened fat on the dry branches
too many storm seasons,
the weight of snow and the tear of wind.
One day it will snap and dance through the street ecstatic
wildly pumping fizzling light
thieving from the normalized diffusion releasing into to the air.
tracer rounds evaporating in a few feet.
The kick up dust and charred back alley gravel.
the weight it bore and task it was given.
None as long as its mad dance in memory. White on black, flashes of dirty cars,
its own festival of reparation
the grid made mortal if only fleeting
a break in the skin
a fountain of arterial light
It will be replaced in the morning. Corrected.

The water main popped
bleeding
out from beneath
pooling in the years cracked
and punctured alley ways

rallying in uneven
gutters
sagging alongside decaying tar
Illuminating
where the money went