I fidgeted in my seat, my seventh grade teacher reviewing my IQ test results. He looked over his thick rimmed glasses at me, frowning, as if the words he would speak made no sense to him.

“You have a great potential.”

and there were streetlights
of blue mercury poison.
geologic infiltration of delirium
nocturnal urban ranting, fluid as snowflakes.
but they were beautiful
chromatic in their way, in the stars
the brightest, analog of the city.
terminal moraine of arc lamps
spread in spectral meridians above and below.

evolution of streetlights
become alien vaporized pink salt,
blurred pandemic of spreading fugue.
here, the stars find no sisters.
contained, the city finds no sky.
flat ceiling of orange rotting glass:
opaque, tautologous, masturbatory,
grounded in recent days and all but buried
in smoking cobble pre-determined.
resign to safety this pure disgorged sodium—
it kills only the heart,
and then
only slowly.