Running from Shame

This is what you have feared too long
opening old maps to see
a pawn shop for freedom
selling bottles at eight a.m.
You can run from the secret desecration
with shame’s sad flotsam
surfacing the salty swell.

Pain’s too sudden, could you ever admit
wrecked citadels cowered behind, walls
of magazines would fall?
Workmen pay for their paper,
a wheel of pastry, coffee;
the world moves audaciously beyond

this city of burnt out blocks
where a call to prayer proceeds
through your tinnitus of sore memory.

You took a train under ground
then a bus over it. Clutches of
children rode out to school;
they breathed against the cold glass
and left a mark.
Should you also wander from the
strange perpetual dawn and into
that shocking light?