Poetry

There's something about sunlight
Filtered through leaves.
No, it's not that; it's the uncanny
Resemblance to cheese on a grater
As you're still pushing it across.

Like elastic bands cut into bands
Of elastic, which, for some reason,
You're pushing through a hole.

Except the cheese was bought on sale
And then frozen, so it crumbles into
Inelegant boulders, and the elastics
Are bunching up at the entry site
Like a paper lantern made by a child
And set down on a table by an adult.

His face was square, like a traffic sign whose edges,
Rusted by ice and then chiselled by gusts of wind
Funnelled through a narrow brick street whose bricks
Keep coming loose, tripping up cyclists who, trying
To avoid pedestrian tourists, always in their puffy
Jackets like baked hams wrapped in twine — not that
You've ever seen a real ham — stuck with toothpicks
To make little legs agile enough to avoid loose
Bricks, have to swerve — damn tourists — unexpectedly
Into each others' paths, and whose bricks are speckled
With the brick blood of the unlucky ones, surrounded
By tall facades with small hooks (you think of standing
Beneath a bus stop shelter at night, looking up
At the translucent stalactite aimed at your eyes,
Thinking of Kate Bush's Wuthering Heights) to pull up
Furniture, still less dangerous than the bricks,
Inert, red, to hide all the blood, on either side,
Have become just barely lifelike enough to mistake
For edges cut by God, great sculptor that He is,
Making man and breathing into him the causality —
That ineffable, undisentanglable parable of weavings.

Automatic (caution) doors

Kept awake by automatic (caution) doors. It's four a.m.
And the yellow (black) circle (stripe) doesn't seem to know
I've already figured them out. It's four a.m. and count
The bells from the clock tower. It's Amsterdam and it's
Ten hundred hours Eastern time (it's twenty-two hundred
Hours Eastern time) and I'm awake. If you break (take)
The law (more than ten Euros' worth of unscanned groceries
Into your own hands) then they take (break) you to prison
For a night. It's Amsterdam and it's twenty-two hundred
Miles (it's thirty-five hundred years Before Christ
And they've just figured out how to make poetry exist)
From home and count the bells from the clock tower. Go
To sleep between the automatic (caution) doors and throw
(caution) to the wind and feel the (caution) bells slam
Into your sides. And idly wait while the bells toll
And keep your unscanned groceries inside the line.
They're only unscanned now that we've got the time
To write barcodes. It's four a.m. and the night tolls
Are less (count them) than those in the day.