These are all from NaPo really. Some of them are from the past year or two that I worked on, or attempted to work on, over NaPo. I simply haven't been in the mind-frame for poetry. It sucks, it really does.

An Insidious Comic

I become illiterate here,
lose the knowledge or thirst for words--
succumb to a simple sensory shot on a beam of light,
sprung from a tunnel into
a noisy jargon of steel lapped steel--
a trek of words streaming across a building,
bubbling in neon over brick

as symbols and unattached sentences
tint through night and day,
on the road, and subway rails in a great grey rush,
of Les Miserables, Phantoms, and Operas.

But some places are better left unread--
like here on the outskirts;
roads sucked dry by the sun,
where walls scream after gone roofs, curl up camouflaged behind a crop of graffiti,
and weep in weeds over weathered signs.

There are stories told in the scroll of battered buildings,
among the flashing shutters of yellow tape and brownstone;
in the splayed figure by a doorway stretched like an empty
yellow speech balloon; her silent screams spilling over sidewalks
among the unintended elegies of chalk rainbows and hearts--
another cacophony of unread words.