Bipartisan Politics

I wear the sleet hat and soft snow suit-
Call me the bureau of bad decisions
Made between rush hour and witching hour.

I’m descending these tragicomic stairs
Like so many crashing pianos,
As if I didn’t know acrylic emotions lasted forever.
As if the department of abstract aging hadn’t already closed.

The phrase ‘landside victory’ runs through my mind.

On the wall of my office hangs a picture of a lavender girl
With blown out eyes and a James Joyce haircut.

She’s an old assistant who once gifted me the complete history
Of park benches as told by expired parking meters.

I lent the book
To the milk-carton missing persons portraitist.
And haven’t seen him or her in a decade.

Tomorrow’s election day.

Below me, dead bushes
Skirt green glowing parking lots
And the office park complex falls asleep.

I think of my secretary
Who only spoke in the past tense
And wore an ellipse for a necklace.

She reminded everyone
To turn their clock backs a month late.
To ‘fall back’ as they say.

We’re down in the polls.

With coat-rack fingers
I sift through a colony of cardboard
Behind the dumpster.
Here I find a new home for my roll-a-dex
And a black bodied nameplate with my name on it.