Happy National Poetry Month

We had just finished chalking the
stone studded cement sidewalk
that hugs the field.
Our scratches of poems caught from
the minds off-guard passers by littered
the path that hundreds walk each day.
I stood, hands dry and suffocating
with a panoply of multicolored particles
wedged in the creases and groves on my hands.
I was a true hippie: a smudge
of North Carolina blue across my thigh,
a bubble gum streak on the sleeve of my t-shirt
a lemony blur on my right hip.

She, on the other hand, was wearing a suit.
It was beige...
Enough said.

I stood speaking with an excited class mate
who, having no commitments, chose to spend
his afternoon scraping off shards of chalk
in to what he wanted to be poetry.
None of us could stop him.

Her heels clopped on the sidewalk
like a horses hoves. She clipped and
clopped like a mounted cop
and just as ready to bust.

"Have you gotten permission to do this?"
From who?
"Every time someone submits to do chalking
on the sidewalk, it's always rejected."
Then why submit?

She interrogated me, her lackey
steadfast narc
shifting eyes toward fellow students
and passers by who stood around
appreciating our work
and our commitment to this
project.

She asks me to wash it away
and i say, "You get me a hose,
and I'll spray it all down."
because it's not about the destination
the journey already happened.
She took down my name
and my professor's name
and I took down hers.
Bitch.

Then, from six
thousand feet up in the sky,
a cloud shed just one little tear.
I think it was laughing at how stupid she looked
talking to me, the chalk master
the builder of street verse. Box of colors on my arm.
The tear careened through sky and wind and
trees and thoughts above my head until
it exploded on impact with the breast of her jacket.
A splotch of revenge.

We both looked up and saw the dark cloud
dividing the sky with menace
and that good old "fuck you" spirit
that only a cloud, brought to tears from laughter
could throw down with wet and furious hands.
A laugh of thunder and
BANG
my hose became obsolete. I had buckets.
And she was soaked.
And I laughed, because clearly
if there is a god, he liked what we did.
I stood before her with my arms outstretched
eyes skyward, as she put her lunch over her head
and ran back to her cubicle
tucked into a dark corner of the ugliest building on campus.

I went back later to get pictures of the smudges
that our creativity had left on the road. It all had
blended together into a glorious chalk dust tye-die.
Our efforts had become one and the same
holding hands and wrapped in each-others smiling embrace.
I looked up over the field at the boisterous black cloud
hovering over the East Bronx. I waved and thanked him.
And this hippie, was happy.

The Dogma of Artificial Running

The treadmill has a
holy rhythm.
It's speed button
carries the plight
of generating
an electronic pulse.
The computed corpse
knows the struggle of stride,
the ambition of a size four,
the gluttony of late night shwarma.
It measures your saturated fat
in bowls not tablespoons.
The sin of Body Mass Index
blinks in flashing lights,
mocking your five mile entry.

The only thing in common
with your psychiatrist
is loneliness.
It doesn't understand
the death of an iPod,
the flesh of thighs
peanut-buttered together,
or pink blood spooning
light blue cotton.

Pity is an emotion
foreign to a CO-2 generator.
It only knows
failure and success.
An oxygen exchange,
hard enough for a back alley,
guilty enough for a blurry mirror
with an unlimited horizon.
Just step,
melt,
breathe,
beg.