William Simone Di Piero

Trying to find my roost
one lidded, late afternoon,
the consolation of color
...

We loiter in the cobblestone alley,
Beans, Clams, Yom-Yom and me,
smoking punk. Snip the wiry stem,
trim the nubby end, scratch fire
...

A grainy predawn dark, early Expressway traffic
bleeding arterial tail lights across gray water
and its blue heart. Under Lemon Hill,
grunts from Boathouse Row, woodshop clunks,
...

Use me
Abuse me
Turn wheels of fire
on manhole hotheads
...

In my dream I watched it
from a windowsill Come see this
raptor's shadow hushed
down green-brick tenements
...

He put the spirit essence
the light pip not only
in each eye's albumen
concentrate of starlight
...

rumdumb from last night's shrubbery tryst
exhales soot, fernseed, shoots and vines,
brings his hot breath from the city park's wood,
saying a song we don't understand
...

Hobos wail a garbage can against
the cyclone links. The monkey puzzle tree
droops its scaly tails above our heads
as she sets up near the zoo's bonobos,
...

From where I stood at the field's immaculate edge,
walking past the open patch of land that's money bounded,
in California's flat sunlight, by suburban shadows of houses
occupied by professors, lawyers, radically affluent do-gooders,
...

The poetry's arrested in his scene,
which can't be trusted, because I saw it
through painkillers that softened my head,
after I'd asked him what Keats really meant:
...

The silence of night hours
is never really silent.
You hear the air,
even when it doesn't stir.
...

Bobby Hutcherson in Oakland
The mallet strikes but something's off,
and so he hits again, curling that lower lip,
purses his brow, as if this sign, this minor woe,
...

a thing that's called radar love,
the whole hog calling,
and here's unhoused Ginger,
distracted wind-beaten beauty
...

My aunts mentioned her just once,
calling her my aunt, their sister,
though she wasn't. They mentioned
the vinyl recliner in the kitchen,
...

She visits still too much, dressed in aromas
of fir needles, mango, mold: I still get lost
knowing she's close, me not getting younger
or more conscious. Sometimes I fantasticate
...

Where are you now,
my poems,
my sleepwalkers?
No mumbles tonight?
Where are you, thirst,
...

There's no description in the braided stone,
the pear, the stone in the pear, the birchbark,
bread hills on the snowfall tablecloth.
The dog of work gnaws the day's short bone,
...

Its small celestial reach stops
where the counterweight, the first
tough green fruit, pulls earthward
and returns the brazen, almost rank perfume
of blossoms now six months gone.
...

The Santa Fe Depot's Moorish architecture of displacement—
squeaky kids trawl satchels through the shed, happy voices
mystically far from home, the waiting room's fizzled, tiled light
of life lived imperfectly between one where and another.
...

going on everywhere
in summer's cold wind
winging through hollies.
...