twenty-three dollars by Steve Calamars

in my bank account
and kafka stories
shuffling thru my skull

i’m a mess of
taut lean muscle
and
book smarts

as these rainy
december days
roll beneath my
vans like
ball-bearings

and i trip over
the weeks
and fall into the nightmare
of a new year
with time clocks
unnoticed prose and
shrinking youth

i see carver mopping
floors and cleaning
toilets till his death

i see selby never getting
out of a hospital bed
and over to a typewriter

i see lorca crushed by
the loneliness of new  york
and leaping from a towering
tenement rooftop

and i see my own
bearded face
stocking cereal boxes
in a grocery store

run down by life
tire-treads like
typewriter ribbon
torn across my brain

my mind caved in
from an avalanche of
unfulfilled ambition
and words heavy
as anvils—