The Wake

Men were thrown into a furnace and pulled out with a hook to be placed on the executioner’s block still alive. More often than not the flesh consecrated by the immolation was eaten.
Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share
MIT Press

Roofs like baked cardboard sprawl above
the plastic factory cogs and dream catchers.
There are two ways to the bistro.
Take the one with the wide berth of Catholic Charities
to drink microbrew in panhandling forget-me-nots’ stead.
Besides this avenue’s quicker and
they’re vagrants and they’re lost.

A stop in Kansas City with the black ones,
the garbage bags, the neck tattoos, the drug-land royalty
You step like an urchin through the warehouses
by the alleys to the rivers
where it suits you and you can drink from a bag.

Jai, loiters at Palamino’s.
He’s left his front teeth
in Nebraska with a red girl. She made love
to him, on a bus.
And he, he gives up weed and howdy’s for a favor
because he’s homeless and He’s lost.

Along and past, the quick route convenient
berth and skirt, the beer
tastes like scalded flesh because it
reminds you of a joke about the afterlife.

There’s drink enough for a country of vagrants.anyhow the sun	has to keep shiningand shelters and programs secure it.