Slow, Cold Drops

i.
it's a slow fever, the sweat rises and recedes,
as the weeks sprinkle onto sidewalks from the shredded calander balconies of new year's.
i've been dreaming under the missing person wallpaper in federal waiting rooms;
and in the paper-cut windstorm outside,
the faxed and photocopied faces of a twice lost race
age in the black ink blur of a rained-on print-out.
i wake up dumbly and stroll through the police line-up of my daily selves;
and in the body count of a new day:
side-streets slept on, leaves black-bagged, a broken umbrella curled,
as a dying insect, on a sidewalk slate-gray in the drying rain.
and later, dodging a blocked-out penthouse,
the sun over a flooded lot sets into itself.
here on my nine thousand some-odd opening night
on the closed-eye coma-wide walk-into-the-light tour;
where names, they roll off like sheets of ice,
and the slow, cold drops, they land around the four.

ii.
he watched himself on a fifth generation dub,
and through the hiss and dulled color cracks, became distrustful,
shutting it off just ahead of an old verse, stark and untrue
in the video blur of a night club in a twice-crossed america.
every tour begins in the collapsed veins of an old map,
with the bonedust of a plan, but ends in a slow roll
with the skull of a wyoming bull on the grill of a rented minivan.
three things: 1) you lose people in life,
and often, leaving them where they stood, and still stand.
2) you make songs on cds, that come out and vanish
in the vacuum of money made and things piled, on shelves, and in memory.
3) the unwordable weirdness of coming across your own name in a search engine,
like toe-stubbing your own tombstone at twenty-four
in a backlit blur of message boards in the visceral black of abstract space.
i wonder if one ever bleeds into the others...
if they strain to catch the flown language of a younger tim?
every tour begins in the collapsed veins of an old map,
with the bonedust of a plan, but ends in a slow roll
with the skull of a wyoming bull on the grill of a rented minivan.
every girl, twenty-two, wants to move to california,
but their last lines, over long distance, go:
"love to come, but i'm nailed to the set;
fixed just so in a home crowd's head."
i've promised myself to never sand my fingerprints off
to impress the one i'm waving to.
instead, i'll do it to feel all new to done friends,
gone flames, and the bristled contours of my aging face
(my poor aging face).

iii.
an old friend with elbows akimbo in the two-handed camera catch
of a thing otherwise loseable,
and in the body count of a brand new day,
you wake up and the world has wandered away,
a vacuum of potholed parking lots in its place, through which you pace
and feel a part of you blur in the shaky tilt of the turned-away earth,
where names roll off just like sheets off ice,
and the slow, cold drops land around the four.
it's the forensics of a city-life led:
you pointing at a flooded lot trying to explain what was once there,
over which, while you watch the sun set into itself (into itself).
pinpricked by the slow, cold drops (cold drops) rolling off a corner awning,
slicking the roadside dead,
ticking off another name in the bent-light blur of a repeat sunset.
a light dies in the loose change of an unled life;
storm-chasers like us, we're on a black-out tour.
because the names roll off like sheets of ice,
and the slow, cold drops, they land around the four.