31_days | [SEPTEMBER 9] [ORIGINAL] [A PERFECT MAP TO THE UNDERGROUND]

Title: A Perfect Map to the Underground
Day/Theme: October 9, 'skin has gotten thicker but it burns the same'
Series: Original
Rating: PG, mention of combat-induced PTSD

The wind tugs the plane leaves down the pavement.

New skin tenses over hot milk

In a seventies saucepan in burnt red enamel.

Your brother has come home from the war

Where his food kept the shape of its plastic

Where they’re filling up windows again in the city.

He came home to the wide edge of the city

But he walked down the inside of the pavement.

His time has gone supple and plastic

Crumbs waxy and greasy as old milk.

He walked out down the streets of his old war

A boy with his helmet, rough red old enamel.

His bones are chipped up like enamel

Inside him and under the city

A secret enclosure an old war

Through plague pits and under the pavement

The air is as sloppy as warm milk.

Hang onto the grip-darkened plastic.

He was used to the comfort of plastic,

Zipped up into tight dun enamel.

The touch on his skin was like warm milk

Warm as the small air of the city.

Men sold apricots, tamarind, out on the pavement,

Curved bones of old cellphones, black spackled bananas, talk of war.

This city sells red phone-boxes, sallow loose-grained tomatoes, an old war,

Tight brown hotdog slugs, extruded plastic.

When Hammershøi painted these pavements

He gave them the look of dirty enamel.

Now fried onion sweetens this circle of city,

Blackened rings glassy as watered down school milk.

You hand him a cup full of warm milk

A joke when you got through to his own war

They had strung it all over the city

The wet strings of war hung from new stands of plastic

And up over the mountains like unfired enamel,

Their dust on the lawn chairs, the plastic, the pavements.

The grey city tastes like onions and milk.

On the turn down the pavements come the black flakes of one war.

And your tongue in your mouth is like plastic, enamel.