sleep

running with a streetlight streamer pulled down from the rafters of a city asleep with a neon cowboy sitting on the bar with Jackie eating lemons and tequila and sticky syrup from a navel abandoned long ago upon the polished wood slipping across with slopping foam of an amber brew thrown over to Steve who sits waiting patiently in leather eating peanuts from a crystal ash tray that slipped from a hand ages ago and busted Steve in the head, he wears the scar proudly just like the one from the war hiddin behind his bandanna under the helmet as he crosses the bar and walks out grounding his hog into the gravely knocked apart asphault of the outer city, raring down into the desert leaving and blowing the streamers about that i picked up from a party somewhere with birthday hats and cake in the midtown park before the raccoons came to gorge upon the candles and crawl upon the tables in snarling bushy masses their bandit masks hiding their true rabid identities under their oreo fur striped on the hat of Johnny with his high water overalls pulled across his bare chest with one strapped hooked as he swings his legs in the Kentucky back country off the dock that his grandpa built, Grandpa Dave with the hooker tattooed on his forearm and his chubby fat cigars he grew so fond of when he was warring with his boys, flying bombers off a southern sea and dropping those packages that exploded in a million tiny embers hours later when the flames ebbed sending tree confetti across a crispy forest with crispy houses and crispy cities, sleeping cities where the whole city sleeps and the other nations send love for the cities, send parties and clowns in white coats with their instruments plugged in their ears, humming with the beat of the faint heart and dancing in the moonlight, dancing around the horizontal bodies in the tents with the people wrapped up in their mummie stuff like the kings of old buried in the sand for six months then pulled out and embalmed and encased in gold like a christmas choclate months old in the discount basket at the grocery store in the squeeky tiled floors and cold produce section buying milk and bread before the storm comes in and kills the power in the sleeping city when the emergency lights come on and the streetlight streamers are hard to catch like fireflies on the summer nights when I was a kid, jumping for the flourescence of a summer night streaming in the cities that sleep