Baltimore

Bad weather is not so bad in a different city, and tonight the sleet is coating everything glossy and dangerously smooth with its gossamer layer. In a different city, outside alone this night,  I'm a body among bodies. Object among objects. Magenta hat. Green eyes. And the wet drips off me, like it drips off anyone, and that's all there is right now. And all anyone needs to do is move forward and breathe. Statues that we pedestrians are passing by stand immutable, faintly glorious.  Domineering in the sunlight, and shrunk now in the dark.  If I could crack them open and animate their interiors I imagine some of them roiling and furious, and still others whimpering from rot. Oh the lives they must have lived to deserve them. The import of accomplishments. Erected for legacy, and largely now just scenery. Slapped ignominiously by this weather.  Birds sit on them, shit on them, and fly away with a truth about life.  If I could, I would call them to me. Their faint wild smell and heaving little breasts. I wouldn't mind if they clawed my shoulder, tugged at my hair, and scraped my neck, as they told me what they saw from up there, and how it felt to leave, rising above both statues and people. And then I would know what they know.  Living is not triangulated and charted, erected and legacied. It's flying. Which is to say, it is cold-fingered and panting, soft and serious, concerned and thoughtful, grateful and doubtful, hungry and full and broken hea rted and you and me, us and we.  Sore with dreams.  These thoughts unravel at night, and lovingly strangle me.