Suspected of Purple Longings

Pink-eyed, albino, the night
drags and dredges to expose
the fatal crash of the one man
suspected of purple longings.
You could have testified

that his trousers fit so badly,
so baggy in their extremities,
that he couldn’t have committed
the thought or daydream of which
he could have been convicted.

I also could swear that the mid
summer hail that packed his eye
sockets never melted, leaving him
too innocent to express himself
except in the most general terms.

He crashed because he learned to drive
by watching movies from the Fifties
in which rear projection replaces
the fits and tremors endemic
to the actual landscapes we love.

You want to publicly mourn,
but the police have affixed us
with expensive German optics,
so we should smile like a pair
of oysters arranged on a plate.

Maybe those purple longings
linger in narrow streets lacking
those powerful orange streetlamps
that erase the faintest bloodstains,
Maybe we can duck in doorways.

We’ll cuddle like plush upholstery
in memory of the man who crashed
in a shatter of primary colors
too fragile to bear witness
to the text his momentum scrawled.