The Day My Lung will Burst

Oh that would be a first,
Driver,
you should know
that me and my dream-ghost of Van Gogh
are learning to taste again,
plum and rock salt,
cardamom and coconut,
because the morning after I had my first cuban,
my eggs crumbled ash.

Driver,
I’ve been dreaming
that everything slows down,
I am buckled to a passenger seat and shot
by four men with four cubans
flying from their lips.
From four corners, I am shot through the lung
like caning on a rush seat.

Driver,
the crowds arrive like cracking
walnuts. And I sit; We sit.
Me and Kostas, an Athenian diner of a man,
on church steps. It’s a wooly day.
We watch the demonstration protest fruit.
Kostas says, message and platform fruitless,
they have missed the irony
that the age of the peaceful protest had long died in war, says, I am ha lf
the man I will be tomorrow,
and I am inclined to agree.

Driver,
only yesterday Winter hit
hard and hugged me. Bear-hugged tight like Ima’s binded books. Oh please,
like you’ve never seen man
crucify a Lexus with swordfish. I tried to see if I could discover martyrdom and I failed

so I rang up my numbers guy and told him ‘Run it again.’
He said: This day-before-yesterday phenomenon/I am afraid
further discussion would have no value.

I find it salient to mention I am my own numbers guy.
And I’m afraid
if repent is real.
I’ll have to do it

and Driver,
There is so much paint,
on things that aren’t paintings.
And so I’m muddy molasses.
And when everything speeds up again,
which never happens too often,
the bullets cruise through my brain and hug the opposite gunmen,
and in that moment it was like Kostas, so powerful, tugged my arm so I spill
200 years into a future where New York has fishbowled
into the Hudson because skyscrapers threw the city
balance off and where the midwest is rubbed off by pumice. And it is here
I have the vision that in the atrium of a waiting room, a left lung reads People
magazine, calls to an ill brother like an orca to another orca,
and right then all the lungs in the world hop out of their bodies. In solidarity
marchsinglefile. Nurses stand outside on their break and wait,
and maybe this is it:

the saddest thing, Driver:
I can’t stop playing
psychiatrist, Driver,
because who will
if I won’t?

Driver,
I woke up in leaky boat
one that creaked on a soup moat.
and my boat was sinking
perhaps it was the opposite of wishful thinking
when considering the damage I’ve done to my lungs
and all the slander I’ve spoke to men with holy tongues
These have been the stone ages, Driver,
an italic neanderthal in my appreciation of the world
and generally stoned everywhere.

As if I’m toeing the line
of how biblical I should be.

Driver,
I slept myself awake
to remember a younger day
when Kostas told the affliction of common man:
that man is only man when called so. That I should call more often so I called,
but it was more like the flatline of grating plum. Kostas he preaches:
sometimes you need a migration
to get away from your vacation.
and Driver, Please weatherman to me again because I can’t see
out the window. Explain water cycles
or reincarnation. Simply
how a man leaves
his suitcase at baggage pickup
and it just keeps going.
Like Kostas never picking up no

more, Driver,
There’s an ashtray in your car,
Driver and I have no spoons,
but in another life I may have eaten your ash.
There was that time I ate the soup in my fishbowl with the Pope’s
prized ruby spoon: his joy and hope.
Here I am spilling
My guts: The ashtray has half-past fishbowled so pray.

Tell, Driver,
me and you are just bodies
of water and Socrates walked the tightrope didn’t he?
The problem is I have forgotten
how to drink, but I am learning
to taste, Driver,
the problem, Driver,
I only know myself when someone is beside me,

including me.