Tableau

Where did he go, the one willing to work our way
down the strip of cheap eats?
The other ones go for fads
with boys riding in top-down canopies
to Krispy Kreemes, where the theater stood
with cathedral chandeliers
and we saw 2001 as a family
at its opening and later grown
men smearing mud on their mugs,
crawling around in paranoid chiaroscuro
as if they lost their way in the legs of a Caravaggio painting
where a page boy is screaming for help
while the big-wigs have fallen.
Luckily angels have dispatched, light cracks open the corridors
enough to make our way to the water cooler
in the mall security of ready vending machines
and our linoleum sounds ricocheting
the penetration of fluorescence.

(Tacoma 2006; Taipei 2010)