He walked passed mirrored dining rooms
Through an empty sea of cascading booths
Each wave a ghost
The dead reef calls it coral home
The final resting place for lost and sunken souls
The hour of the wolf's darkness impregnable
But there's no exit from the artifacts of North Denver
Glaring like cataracts in the eyes of new beholders
Acid bubbles over black lakes
Like the glistening eyes of tarantulas
Always refillable
His genius slaked by ancient gravitas
He takes the long way home
Skipping stones across the loam
A waft of petrichor through ionized particles
Pebble and bone constellations made a scroll of stories
Across dry beds
A cemetery of narratives awakened and undead
There's a storm rolling in
Reminding the willful their rightful place
Mother Nature's a scapegoat
For hungry ghost capital unrestrained
He often found family closer to the ground
Their stories in the fertile soil
Relational migrations abound
On my sixth cup the coffee's stale
I'm one cup closer to the coffin's nail
Death to decaf and other cops
When I die just pour out a pot
Bloodshot sun the dawns coming
A truck downshifts like Gene's drumming
Rhinestone glasses reflect the stop lights
Now it's dusk this is not right
Tattooed fingers touch the toast
The coffee steam's a summoned ghost
Emotional weather report
11 o'clock blues and scattered showers
The cue ball moon scratched to a black hole
Cover me in plaster it's after hours
Jaco on the jukebox, Donna Lee
I walked up federal from one seven Wazee
I followed the crooning of the Kenworths
Creeping up I-70
I see the phantom 309
Big Joe smiles and flicks me a dime
It's a rendezvous of strangers in a graveyard charade
It's another narcotic night as the constellations parade
Nighthawks at McCoys, no future, no coffee, no joy
Each diner is a portal, do you create or do you destroy
Tom pushed a piano down the stairs not to watch it break
He pushed it down the stairs
To see what music it would make