Cicadas

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Lounging in a pool of thunder, inhaling vanilla razor blades on Poetry’s front porch, the white noise wonder needs little overture: five seconds from first swell to peak, and all 39th Street sounds like it's asphalt is being ravaged by an enormous, mutant rototiller.
Yet I see nothing, light another razor, contemplate a third chai latte.
*
I like this Starbucks, because it doesn’t look like a Starbucks. It looks like it used to be a travel agency with low ceilings, asbestos paneling, fluorescent lights and the baristas are all Bukowski Heads.
(StarBuk’s? No.)
Some oversight in the bowels of the Thought Police Department left the poets in charge of this section of town as if the Paris Commune could reincarnate in the heart of the American Midwest in the 21st Century.
*
The white grind backwash din comes from everywhere & nowhere & I’m swimming on Poetry’s front porch in a haze of lightning & vanilla razor blades.
The sergeant at arms of the 39th St City Council comes home & sees the crease in my brow bent by the ethereal shrieking
“Cicadas” he says.
“No way.”
“Yup.”
Imagine living in a place where liquid feedback fills the spaces between the floating moisture. No wonder you can’t throw a rock around here without hitting a poet.
They say the farmers on the Kansas plains went insane from the howling of the wind but maybe they just became poets.

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*
The chair of the 39th St City Council breezes up the steps which lead to Poetry’s front porch with a guava brisquet and curry potato salad rocking tonight's open mic sermons in front of the dial a prayer booths someone stole from down the block.
The chair and the Sgt. At Arms love each other, but not enough & the sadness grows fat on the humidity. The weekend council session is long and the Sgt. and the Chair are charged with an eroticism they project onto everyone else at the meeting, near oblivious to each other's flirting with every other council member and poet.
Beneath a pool of lightning we are all screeching now, unable to drink enough of the humidity & a defrocked priest looks me dead in the eye & says “You’re a bad man. I know what you're gonna do back in those back rooms!”
& the whiskey is good, and I make my move down into the labyrinth, a bad man looking for trouble, making my last stand in the back rooms, in the liquor store at closing on Poetry’s front porch,