To the immediate west, a beautiful sight,
And simple in its looming.
I have the Sutro's constellation perched above me,
Its four red points blinking in the drink of fog and night
Like some ethereal point of entry.
The radio says it's coming up on 4AM,
And 16th Street's suddenly hot wired with chivvying cries
Of the highly sexed, a barrage of them, eerily canned,
One playboy after another sounding off burdened reports through the air;
Invisible behind trees and penumbras of street lamps but voices all the same, looping down from second and third story windows, each one
Flared from the augurs of narcotic frights to pass leeward
And careless to the women below.
You motherfuckers are goin' to jail.
And just like that— a tacit inception or some shared psychic reasoning—
The night falls slapdash into fugue, its haunted figures askitter with needle points surging willy-nilly through the body of them as they go veering across the darkness like startled insects, a scratching, sniffing, febrile emblem of indecisiveness, pushing on buzzers,
Imploring upwards in hisses, every one of them dying a little more.
Like the kid asprawl on the stoop, sick and keenly marginal
Like a late-model Tantalus in up to his neck, denied fruit,
And so realizing that the stuff's bigger than him, that it's the unrequited love, and therefore in everything he sees.
