Cookie, Enclosed By Squares

Cookie, Enclosed by Squares 

And rectangles,
Wooden coffins lowered into the dirt, 
Father, brother
Hard heads, block heads.

Locked doors.

Four corners,
and a glossy linoleum floor, 
Splashes of hot chocolate,  
Bounced marshmallows 
Mental patients clutched sloshing cups. 

Window of a white car, 
night blowing in,
a man at the wheel,
passenger with dark shoulders,
sand dunes were tombstones,
sporadic teeth in the roaring maw
of the Atlantic. 

Little Richard on the radio, 
A typewriter and a burning cigarette, 
photographs piled on a coffee table,
sticky layers,
hardened into a single square mass.

Fucking Hell,
Richard spilled a coke. 

Tenement window,
city stifled by skyscrapers,
a clatter in the turning fan,
a stoning,
no, Vittorio,
and a palmful of pebbles.

You rescue the cheetah, old, 
already dead, 
from a dumpster in alphabet city,
A door prize under the theater seat, 
A calculator,
name of a defunct bank in block letters, metallic gold,
an embossed vault.

You’re the winner,
and John Waters loves your coat.

Television, 
The squared jaw of a man who never met you.
He has written an article. 
He spoke to someone who knew your mother. 

Memory is a monolith.