I

Main Street at weekday dawn,
where and when everyone flees from homes
choking on the flames of neuron misfires.

They say the arsonist bears a briefcase,
an arsenal of unimportance
stockpiled in the armory of a daydream.

But, approaching the gates of the marketplace,
one can see that everyone's worn
their Sunday best to the battlefield.

The attendant at the gates, she's no liar,
though her brown eyes will stalk you
with the suffered innocence they twitch for
and look away to hold on to.
A lone iris is like a dusty layout
for a war bunker built over graveyards of nostalgia.
Her face is a lifetime surrendered to masking the scars
carved into her by blasts of shotgun stares,
those that splinter into shards that linger with their wounds.

You think you're dressing a laceration
when you glance at her feet instead of her nametag,
but flesh peels all the same.

Those eyes were just too much to confront

when she calls out to a girl pedaling after
everything and nothing on a pink bike
that's really yellow with white streamers,
dangling in the winds of memories
blurred by a finish line that never appeared.

Yellow, you think, like the lines that trace
the veins of heartache on the highway.
White like the dashes that separate
one car chasing and another speeding away.

She turns from these illusions to your admittance,
which is no more than the pulling of a barred door,
yet you hand her the only money you came with.

"It's free," she says, with the satisfied disgust
of a dancer with bills about her bra stitching.

But you leave her frozen in the nakedness of awaiting.

II

Main Street at weekday dawn,
where and when everyone longs for homes
they've left to buy something that's not for sale.

They say the customers bury their hearts
inside their backpockets or purses
and hope to carry that emptiness in shopping bags.

But the scenes past the gates of the marketplace
tell of lives clinging pale-knuckled
to the pulses reminding them to breathe

(when holding your breath is all you hear).

The man with the sad brown eyes and the smile
limps like a war survivor,
but stares at his feet as if he were just drafted
to photograph the horror.
A lone scar crawling along his eyebrow
bolsters his movements with the faint glow like the ghost of a crown.
His face is a lifetime of walking away when his legs
were too numb to run, too jaded with the chore
of having to bloody themselves in the act of falling back.

You think he's offering pity money
when you stare at the signs lurking beneath his cuffs,
but wounds can be magnetic.

Those eyes were almost too much to confront

when you waved to a girl you thought
you had known in one moment or another,
only to watch the man turn his head
to a memory racing up his arm,
propelling through his blood at the speed of an open sore.

Yellow, you think, like the lines that trace
the veins of heartache on the highway.
White like the dashes that separate
one car chasing and another speeding away.

You wonder why her lips were a hearse,
or why he held her
as if she were slumped against a steering wheel.
Love must have stumbled into a carwreck of chemicals,
instead of a mistake in touching.
He must have been left with the empty embrace
of fainting in the arms of the emergency room.

"It's free," you say.

And, with the precision in having
rehearsed his death in the same room every night,
he leaves you paralyzed with the notion
that you were a witness.

III

[do they open outward or inward
it doesn't matter my feet have buried millions of those questions
before they could jump my punctured skin
before they could kick inside their wombs
each exit without a welcoming sign
each entrance without a leaving sign
I'm not running I'm walking
fear curdles in the stomachs of the heartless
I'm not running I'm walking
three heads acknowledging me
on the threshold
on the answer to an aborted question
I'm not running
I’m walking
brown eyes trailing me
I know it
brown eyes trailing
brown eyes
I'm walking
I'm not looking back
I'm not running
i'm not looking back
i'm not.
run.
walk.
run.
walk.
i run.
i walk.
I always am.]

"It never is," he responds, as he stops
somewhere between fleeing and longing.

His words scatter the money
about the ground,
about the gates of the marketplace.

And their eyes meet.

Crash into each other.

And open

like picking up an abandoned bicycle on the roadside
or
rescuing a silhouette last-dancing in the headlights.