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Solitary Lunatics Up On The Roof


by Lore Prior


Your Indiana Jones hat flops tortilla limp by my ears.
"It's an adventurer's hat" you amend.
You sea-lion grin when I let you dress me in it.
Just black sweats, black shoes and the hat
all clinging to the brick: your comfy neighborhood starfish.
Your spanish neighbor with the neat goatee 
cracks up in his folding chair as I clamber shit scared
rung by rung to the roof.
He's probably laughing at your hat.

Up top, the sky is like a fist fight-
fat lip purple and bitchslap pinks get wilder as the tabs kick in.
Those hovering lights are aliens!
we assert with insistent like-mindedness
from where we sit directly beneath the airport flight path.
"Shit!" you shout, and you shoot to your feet,
jerking backwards, hurling forwards, evading hidden beasties
while I piss myself petrified righteous.
"It was angry!" you explain, but you've hallucinated a bug.

The sun's been crammed below the horizon
and every shadow is itching for the borders of the evening world.
In the acid darkness things rustle unnatural-
through the popped cherry of our spook hymen,
everything's a threat-
life looms more terrible when you're sitting down.
Freshly vertical, we tower monumental with the kaleidoscopic haze,
and our mouths open wide as our pupils-
every fucking inch of night is sparkling like a kindergarten birthday card.
The bowl of the sky's lacquered a thousand times over, 
each layer's infused with fireflies, crystals, bioluminescent hydrozoan jellyfish.
I take off your hat and swallow the moon.
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