My Favorite Color

I stride along silent shadow-streets.
I lose myself in their labyrinth.
Not mislocation, but meditation,
taking cues from the stars and the moon.
Unmoored,
I float above bleak block-buildings.
I am no longer locked in their grid.
The way below me spirals off from straight,
wheeling with the slowly spinning sky. . . .

The pavement rises,
catches my foot and drags me down. I swear
It won’t surprise me again.
(I can almost see my sneakers on the asphalt.
Just a hint of light, but
too much
for my waning, waxen wings.
The east horizon’s sickly yellow-green,
soon to flush with florid, torrid health
that heats a seething sauna-city and
turns the tarmac tar pit–sticky and
I’ll be trapped, en-
tombed un-
til I
fossilize.)

I raise my eyes as high as my sleep-stiff neck will bear.
For an instant I am aloft again
and I see the edge of the night.
It’s a swallow-you-whole blue velvet (cloth mask against viral sun).
It’s a sort of bright black, the darkest shade of dawn.
And then it’s gone, annihilated
(and I’m earth-bound)
by incipient (insidious, insufferable) morning.

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