David Goad 

Homeless 

In the grocery store a man approaches me, 

And asks me to buy him soup. I won't think much 

About it later. After all I am a metropolitan, 

and as a metropolitan I'm taught by the good city 

To disengage like the cloud passing into distance,  

To distract readily as wind in open fields, 

Touching all of it in one wide grasp, then letting go. 

With beaten brow, band-aided finger, and street stench 

He will go through me like that breeze, 

Lost to the everyday misery, 

The simple cost for late kisses 

On our silky length of bed, 

And clinks of glass among our splendid company, 

And by far worth our warm, endless spoonfuls 

In meal after meal after meal. 

Hospital Room 

All night the sour dew courses the raw root 

In the grub tunnel of a hallway where 

"Halfway down and to the right", 

Your body burrows in the backfill 

Of a seed pit, reversing to the germ. 

A deathbed is as much a flowerbed 

As anything. I count your double-backing 

Blossom until you are dirt 

That never produces. 

There sprouting filament 

From your vein, the tubes vine, 

And tendrils reach up saline sacks 

Nourishing you like a cloud 

Over an eyeless head. 

Nature is a pretty betrayal –  

The season tears the skin off the other, 

Swallows red flames from the elm, 

And leaves only the leftover, 

Burnt body lying in November 

of the impotent gray world, 

With all your loathes and loves 

Lost to that hiss of machine, 

over you like a buzzard, the bloody beak 

Ready to make you bone and number.