“The phrase I like to use to describe my sense of time—a play on comparative literature—is comparative time.”

i.
So it is, the chaos
contracted

in an unfolding scene
in five sentences:

Body. History. Evil. God. Human.   

ii.
But what ideas,
in what facts? Inside the sun

the heat is sucking
the soil’s moisture,

Fulton near Pearl, dug up to lay new Fulton Center 
subway power lines, a stone wall, three feet high, 
in silt-muck seven feet below street level, inside it 

Aged malt whiskey and cigarettes
   consumed to enhance consciousness
—read Blake. You can’t regulate

Jesus, the dirt on the walls
is coming from my body,
and love,

On the floor in an apartment
on Boston Boulevard, he knows
he’s going to die.

Before dawn, on the street again,
beneath sky that washes me
with ice, smoke, metal.