Periscope

They stand there all so cool
on that dark platform between
skyscrapers.

The teenage kids in rock bands,
with faded t-shirts over long sleeves,
exchanging notebooks and sounds
like a marble lightly shaken
in a metal can.

The athletes in their uniforms
filling their portions of the team
like a pale hand gripping tightly
a chain link fence.

Couples leaving restaurants
retreat to perfect cars so gracefully
the rain covered pavement like glass
chilled and filled with whiskey.

The bums have their harmonicas
and deep throated vocalizations
offered up to the swirling cloud over the city.

The managers and cops collude
like sheepdogs and spend their days
leaning against brick walls,
mailboxes, or whatever else
just happens to submit.

Teachers lie to get home on time
breaking bike chains
and riding past windows
where everyone’s bored.

The young waste time doing spin jumps
into public pools where slightly older
lifeguards count the minutes
until it all shuts down and the underwater
light comes on and at last
they are alone with one another.

Mothers garden with their daughters
never refusing the continuous wheelbarrows
of dirt brought to them by their sons.
The punks hold concerts every week
where they all rage around like saw blades
cutting two by fours.

The priests sit on benches outside
their churches and cathedrals
between services,
and get so desperate
for the softness of her skin,
they start to cry
the kind of tears that make
their faces red and swollen
like a pepper.

The postmen beg at their unions,
the carpenters beg at their unions,
and the train conductors beg at their unions.
In response, the reps all gather on the roof
and bounce a rubber ball so high
their old eyes lose it in the sun,
and then they call it quits to reconvene
another night.

I see these things through a periscope
from the bottom of the Southern ocean
where I hid after my ultimate embarrassment.
It’s just me my tools and a cut out picture
of a woman in a bathing suit taped to the wall
by the last loser stuck down here.

She’s beautiful, eyes brown like tree bark,
and legs like the feeling of hitting a walk off
home run in the World Series,
game seven of course, no one remembers
if it’s not to win it all.