The Emporium of Youth

Seen from another angle as when an area—station, square—contemplated on Sunday.

The expression may calcify into a demonstration of thistle-thorn dismay.

By “imagine your face” I mean shadow, your expression itself a shadow.

These colors: light green sky, pale stone, graffiti: these colors now.

The emporium of youth versus the emporium of adulthood.

If Person A will ail at Point X, then Person B will ail at Point Y.

(Loneliness aggrandizes the symmetrical nature of most pain.)

Whereas a big galosh of dirty cloud busts open a caucus of old doves.

Brighten the ticking synapses versus what warms the solid state capacity for violence.

These colors: pale stone, water-wood, radio tower: these colors now.

The difference between idling (unit of river bank) and waiting (unit of high-rise.)

Rust, rusty coloring, what gnaws into our porticos of awareness.

By “imagine your face”, I mean the uncorrected ritual of love.

Or the sliding scale of sunlight, or the balloting of voices in airshafts and alleys.

Dan Gutstein writes: “I'm the author of four books -- non/fiction, Bloodcoal & Honey, Buildings Without Murders, and Metacarpalism (forthcoming), as well as poems and stories that have appeared in Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, American Scholar, The Iowa Review, Best American Poetry, and The Penguin Book of the Sonnet among other publications. Outside of writing, I'm vocalist for punk band Joy on Fire (we have a Tiny Desk Concert scheduled for next year) and co-director of forthcoming documentary film Li'l Liza Jane: The Story of America Through the History of a Song.”