Fire Eater

Night in a coma,
an unassuming night in November,
rain like whiskey
running down the faces of buildings,
rattling of streetlights
and the souls of mosquitos
moving together mechanically, forms,
a badly broken piano played
all across a hundred bars,
across the blank roadways
and the key finding its tonic
in a mouthlike lock.
Beyond the road, chain fences
and pit bulls bark
and sarcastic messy faces
of the bloody and beaten,
the dead dumb drunk
with raggedy suits
and dark leather briefcases
in which the whole town is folded.
They drink the dark upon them.

In every house,
there is a smell of gas.
Searchlights cross the still white faces
of mothers and children, of fathers,
sleeping in their cotton beds
with dismantled organs,
like people that never have lived
but the life of metronomes,
on the operating table, unconscious,
dreaming of their birth, of fire.
I can see you have questions.
Can a dying heart be saved?