Laughing, speaking, and singing emit an invisible
mist of droplets. The clouds hang like viral veils
that drift and transmit.
I’m punching and kicking the air and winning!
Who convalesces now under an overpass?
Who believes a footprint- and mud-stained
fast food receipt a nation’s founding document?
Each new space I inhabit seems text into which I introduce errors.
Asked to describe how architecture sounds, why
does my poor brain imagine not cathedrals
but structures of sheet metal that clang and tick?
Babies keep arriving, naturally operatic.
Tonight the role of sky will be played by smoke,
the role of earth by dust,
the role of water by parts per million.