Confession

With lines by Ralph Angel

I only know what people don't tell me,
The looks on their faces before they have their morning coffee.
For all you know it's a question of bread
Because it rarely is anything more.
"The salsa's on aisle five," next to the dust mops
But we reject consumption and look in the other direction at
A pile of bricks. A ladder. Packages and paper, I miss everyone
Once the guests are gone and the leaves change,
Arranged like magazines and bones, a Coke bottle
Broken on the side of the road like the
moral upbringing of tomorrow's youth.
In the dream I know by heart, all is forgotten.
All that's left is the ideas for change,
begun on a paper napkin and folded into a coat pocket.
Someone will find it in a year and throw it away
Because it's not a twenty dollar bill.
Sometimes we go dancing
Though the world doesn't stop turning, mixing up
the good and the bad but never neutralizing the problems.
A virgin answers all her questions.
And it serves her right to leave experience out. It's
Impossible to make sense of one face
But that's the only thing I know how to do.