SIGNATURE
Poems by J.J. Blickstein

Miniature umbrella
3 red buttons
popcorn
a shoe
in the middle of the floor
things to say-

Last night I dreamt I was eating cake grown on the altar of a tree.
When I speak I see letters instead of objects.
Radio plays water & the mathematic of broken glass.

19 cigarettes
wife on couch dreaming on a red blanket
I close my eyes & paint Sanskrit on the ass of a pony
detective novel in my bones
couch has 3 legs-

I think about the 12 year old girl I saw killed by a beer truck
in Munich-she had pig tails like Heidi. The woman walking
her dachshund wouldn't stop screaming until I smacked her.

The girl looked right into my eyes, wounded, last light in her
breath-dead before she hit the ground. A shot of wind exposing
a tuft of her white panties.

I didn't stick around too long, she was dead.
I rode my bicycle to the movie theater with my lover, drank a beer, watched
a subtitled comedy about a Belgian serial killer.

Drum hangs on the wall
broken cereal crumbs on the floor
portrait of Vallejo framed in black
postcard of a wolf on bookshelf-

The rain makes me think of T. Monk,
war & mummies, race & money,
of all the places I wrote my name in the sand,
& of the pillar of reality, its clock
with tenuous string pulling me forward from erasure.
I go to bed, turn out the light. My wife sings in her sleep.
A whole box of Ohio Blue Tips sits on the windowsill
like a whore, lit up by the headlight of a truck
going somewhere, fast.