Matchbook

As night flew low I got it in my mind to give my plea into the radio grafted in the headboard You were out, mid-sentence, for the night— it didn’t seem like I should wake you: brow & jaw untorquing, coming sweetly disenlaced from what is now a lush reverb around the outgrowth of whatever secret life I’m off the hook to explain—

You go dreaming of those spike strips they pull across the freeway to slow robbers, or pharisaical liars, such was the the case & as in

the rough game one foists upon the baby aghast but lacking words I’m lurched toward lecherous flames in a strange

Maxima, like every other, black bleached gray by exposure to the sun, to my treeless, unincorporated life within your green, dewy one,

translating for myself a narrow & machinelike cursive on a matchbook by the flashes

of a ferris wheel rising up over the berm encircling the county fair

Numbers underneath a name, beneath an embossed banner: yellow this side, black on that, rippled over three gold conquistador’s lances

What could I be moving through other than this underpass retracted overhead, snatched bed sheet making vulnerable stars, the shame in holding consciousness at hours every siren colors tragicomically to dare what I’ve unburrowed to record me

in its river stone eyes?