Josh

Bending over,
I place the knives of mirror carefully on top of my palm.
"I probably would have been the one to smash that
ten years ago," Josh says.
Josh lives on the second floor.
We are sharing our porch stoop this morning,
me being a Sunday laundry person,
him being a cigarette person.
He looks like a young McJagger with a lisp and curled up eyelashes,
his chest swelling beneath a wife beater.
You would never guess he's thirty-three.
"So you were a rebel without a cause, huh?" I say.
"Yeah" he smiles.
"And now?"
"Just tryin to find one." he says.
He's been chasing a BFA for over ten years,
and says, with nicotine teeth,
"I've been messin around for a long time."
I look up and say his slow pace is refreshing.
"Well, only a few more poems to write", he says
"then I'll probably just be working in some coffee shop."

With all the broken mirror pieces in my hand,
I rise
and tell him how I've been trying to write a
big philosophical poem
for the past month.
Then we decide that universals
are best when boiled down
to small real life happenings.

During the mirror's funeral procession to the trash
on Charles and Eager,
I am suddenly holding the sky in my hand.

And when i toss the mirror into
the dark metal bin
with Dorito bags and coffee cups,
it turns into shards of red brick rowhomes
that cut through the sour smell.

I walked away with a bowed head,
in mourning for the mirror,
and for the city,
and then
for the sparrow
who abruptly appeared,
dead at my feet.
Her stick legs jutted out beneath her,
with talons gripping a branch that wasn't there.
Her black eyes were paused in a squint,
like she was looking into something beyond
the hard brick sidewalk
beneath her head.
Her swollen breast shone pure yellow,
as if reflecting the sun.