D.A. Powell

Little Boy Blue

He finds himself inside the Sunrise Mall,
but not at Waldenbooks. He seeks no solitude.
His second great awakening has started,
subdued interstices between kiosks and stores;
the proximity of skimming eyes, or studious eyes
that read him like a copy of Leaves of Grass.
He has come in his holey worn-out jeans.
He has come there in his flimsy little thongs.

And there’s those hankering eyes that seem
to sample him like Orange Julius eggwhite froth
or bits of free salami cubed upon a paper plate
& stabbed by frill-picks. Don’t meet those eyes.
The arcade’s packed with Pac Man players now.
Gobble the cherries. Gobble that consecrated ghost.

D. A. Powell's books include Cocktails (Graywolf Press 2004) and Chronic, (Graywolf Press 2009), both finalists for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry. In 2010, he received the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Prize. A 2011 Guggenheim Fellow, Powell lives and teaches in San Francisco.