One’s opportunities to be unhappy are

Dynamic, ever-expanding, a Ford Mustang chasing

The sun as it sprints panicked to the western limit

Which was the morning you first didn’t think of the riot



And for weeks afterward,    and following what once

Had seemed, and anybody    would have said so, seemed to

Have been a sequence of events in time, and only

To the intelligentsia, then hidden, now



They scurry from one nimbus to another down

The block until they disappear in darkness, then

They reappear in light, then disappear again

In darkness,     and then finally beneath the next



Streetlight they’re gone,    they disappear in light, to whom

What seemed to you a sequence was a sphere of time

Expanding in a space with limits, and with walls at

Its limits, in which objects are a tax the space pays



To what authority? The sphere of the riot, for

What seemed like weeks, but it was only minutes, the

Sphere was conveyed, a polished     gem, from hand to hand

One representative to the next, one party to



The other, in the weeks of their competitive

Expressions of concern, in the minutes of those weeks

Rolling, a golden coin across scarred knuckles, a

Magician or a criminal, but both, the coin



A sphere in the space between two hands, a coin in the hand

Eventually, like bullets in America

The riot passes through our heads and we forget

The riot, everything, what once seemed strange to you



Becomes your heart, American, your heart’s-blood strange

To you, hidden in you, the truest part of you

Unknowable, a minotaur of the hidden god

Who is not you, the god, not even of your own heart