Motions

The lonely people at the bar like to watch
the first dates everywhere run out of things
to talk about before the appetizers.
It makes them happy and they laugh
into their wine glasses wearing nothing
but red mustaches and dark sunglasses,
that make them look like no one in particular.

The front sidewalk through the window glass
is full of taxis taken separately back to
apartments where the air conditioner
is broken and the wall paint flakes
like muscovite but softer.

She cut her iris as a kid in a car accident
so her right eye was a cat’s eye at a glance.
She sends texts under a ladder for bad luck
because she finds she says the right thing
way too often to have any time alone.

The noisy festival full of pretentious people
arguing about movies that they barely
even sat through sends it’s nonsense
through her window until she lets go
of expecting it to end.

Squatters in empty office buildings they used
to work in keep on going through the motions
because it was never really about money
in the first place, it was always just a way of
being normal in a world that’s so obsessed
with it, it’s over, and far from showing signs
of ever coming back.

It’s hard to grasp the fact that the boxes
we bury are receptacles for what’s left
of latent energy that never goes away.
What’s even weirder are the markers
we leave over them, like they are left
there in a plot that someone put them in,
when they are really always
everywhere at once.