[The Shape of Forgetting]

She can see the homeless in
my eyes, advancing
bottomless shopping carts
behind the judge of irises, the
 hideaways of a purposeful
bystanding. 

Always amethyst, they gather
the fallen scraps of eyelashes
for makeshift walking sticks, for the ends of pretend-
swords, for the fodder of a
bonfire to signal their
accumulating presence. 

They grow cold from
sleeping in the shudder of my
blinks. 

Some have already slept to
death, the rest learn to huddle
near the Fahrenheit emitted
by my apathy, and draw/sip
long of the solvent pennies
afforded them. 

They watch me pass from the
unswept porch of my retina,
watch my disregard
abracadabra their reflections
on Market Street back into
the back of my head. 

Embarrassed, I tell her that
universe collapses around the
hazard of their aspects,
allows a gaze adjacent to the
problem of shabby contours. 

Because they are so many
they are one, because sight
can origami anything into
time. 

Life might be the shape of
forgetting, or I really had no
change left, because. 

Blink.

Now they protrude with
endless elbows, diplomas,
kneecaps, daydreams, and
shopping-cart wheels turning
at my skull, the insides of my
vision pigeoning out. 

And she can see them there
as we slip from sidewalk to
restaurant, pursued by rain-
shadow, my hand missing
door-handles distracted.

  Over dinner, I wait for her
to say that the homeless stare
at her, wait. 

For her to say she is aware
that behind them, in the
quietude of microscopic
brown distances, there are LA gangsters, a midnighted
me, and ten thousand
Sudanese refugee-children
walking across the electrified
border of a graying cortex. 

I wait for her to point out
their footfalls from the march
of heartbeats between my
temples and the pin-drop
percussion of eyelash against
face.