A controlled evacuation.
4 a.m. and the solitary piss,
with no idea what woke you late
as childhood slept.
You haven’t finished breathing -
still one final drop. Lungs
fill with sand. Doubts
vanish into Pyramids.
The past is hopeless. Carpet
bags I cannot cup to hold
the circus fragrance of my mother’s house,
a tooth caved in. Long drop,
short drop, old friends first
born of seagull voices. Each Manichean
franchise taunts, ‘Here one
has crossed’.
Sheer drop, dear Saboteur,
you see the empty band,
a ghost ship full of faces lost
like laundry.
One returns an hour or less
to where a car is set ablaze
outside my window.
These measured excavations
of my body’s bottomless
crater A soap dish
and towel clinging
on to save civilization.
Jonathan Jones lives and works in Rome where he teaches at John Cabot University. He has a PhD in literature from the University of Sapienza, and a novella 'My Lovely Carthage' published in the spring of 2020 from J. New Books.