BEYOND MERCHANDISE photo: "Point Pinole" by Rody Luton
Outside my window shopping carts go by filled with
the recycled goods I often cling to—drug addicts, drunks,
psychotics pushing their bottles and cans up this rancid block
that passes for a highway, their damn wheels rattling like
squeaky hips, all night and day. Naturally if I go out to talk
to them—stare into their eyes—what I get is battlefield,
a land of severed limbs trying to regroup while this deadbeat
inside my head sings the blues that would turn into carols
if those limbs ever did fit back together—mine and theirs—
amid the exhale of putrefaction, which would be the smell
of the Lord's body too...if He were every really found.
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