Sun in a Supermarket Ring

When I saw the Sun as God
and death as a man with
a scythe and a pen,

I needed the city.
Holding books to my chest,
I carried them through Greenwich
and nestled them
in the bricks of Wall Street.

I had been awake since before the birds.

The billboards made pitch darkness seem
like the day, so bright it was
as if the sun inched closer to the earth.
I underestimated
the neverending spectacle.
In the way it convinces writers they can
become poets, convinces readers
They can write,

It Convinced Me that
at the highest point in the city,
therefore the highest point in the world,
I too could reach
the manmade heavens sprawled before me
in scars of white We have carved into the earth,
and I could fill the blackness between star-bright lights,
if only
i reached back.

When the planets melted in my fingertips,
I let them drip onto summer asphalt.
I
drowned for eight days.
I
washed up in the Hudson Bay.
The salt scrubbed my skin red, stung
my lips sticky and yellow.
I was a sunflower.

Prowling the streets, I determined to
create
a new set of scars on the earth, but
I saw names where there were none, and
I asked myself if I preferred
HomeMade Moonshine or The Church?
without questioning why
there could not be an
in between.

For one who is at home
in an airport, I failed to wonder,
almost failed to see
if
there is an in between.

I face the island once again.
It pulls. Not as it used to.
To see the civilization not as
the key,
not as a breath of life
is all I can ask of myself.

Somehow, I filled the space between stars
from two and a half thousand miles away.
With sledding and open windows,
supermarket rings and white petals,
satire and The Mysterious Forces of the Universe,
there was a clearing in my eyes
-- was there not?
and I saw that the sun,
not the city lights,
as eternal.