This umpteenth May beginning to the bone,
I live with neighbors like paper in crowned teeth,
articulating their mapwork of ghosts to my own taste.
They write my name in pavement, crouched like fists.
I want to hold it in my mouth and say nothing.
ConEd drills the street to dendrites, tapping morse
at the old house where Mrs. Farrell died in bed.
How’s things? Things happen, hold.
After my child’s scare, I brought a bruiser to heel.
He stood with a clawhammer at the door of the torn maze
he’d made of his mother’s house, her minotaur.
I feel his impression on another page of myself
because all humiliation is a labyrinth of public rage.
Find form for this. In the Crito, Plato calls the wise
to task for retribution, its tooth-on-tooth occlusion.
Am I not streetwise? Shut the door’s jaw. Run.
Let me open the thin black eyes of the rowhouses.
Let me hold every blesséd thing in this beaten world
crying on the carpet of my tongue.
Crito Creātōrum
by Matthew Carey Salyer
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