State-Sponsored Poet
Even so those fluttering birds
but then
after the drinking fountain
ablution it seemed
as if every word
had been misapplied and strange,
the guest therapist
walking in
at three am
with his melodic whistle
I countered
with my mournful one,
oh in another life I
was the glib hubristic longshoreman,
full of Guinness,
stupidly rhyming,
attaching value judgments,
brought low and decentered
in Sunnyside,
everyone looked the same,
not this flimsy apparition on Delmar
with his PRN and SSI,
his lists of gestures on the train,
his phenomenally fluttering brain.
Matthew Freeman is the author of The Boulevard of Broken Discourse.
