Works at the Skateboard Store

East Eleventh Street, between First Avenue and A:
watch the twenty-four-point-seven year-old tattooed
skinny dude rock faintly back-and-forth on haunches –
crablike on the sidewalk: shaved skull: decorated
limbs – skin etched over with a dark blue crimson

black and purple spidery exactitude: rippling inkily
like far-off dreams: his too-large pupils gaze inside
himself somewhere at skateboard triumphs – dazed,
unfazed by scenes so vivid they’re no longer in the past –
those vastly inexplicably delicious loops through air

as if the body on the board were not quite there: as if
an idea’d come to living being minus all the heavy
lassitude of flesh. He pushes up – much older than
the fourteen-year-old kiddies in the skateboard store
behind him – ancient, really, when compared to their

fresh pinknesses: oh, he knows sex and sweat
and blood and fighting: and the drag of paying rent.
These kids might just as well be biting on their baby
bottle nursing nipples (nipples! – damn: her! – only girl
who’d ever left him dry and spent). He’s the aging god

of skinny dudes who would do anything to fly, and he’s
my hero too – to see him speeding through a life like
some tattoo shot out of someone’s rifle of a tattoo needle:
cuts into my heart like scars. Twenty-four-point-seven-
year-old tattooed skinny dude makes me see stars.


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