24/7

The one cashier is dozing—

head nodding, slack mouth open,

above the cover girl spread out before her on the counter

smiling up   

with indiscriminate forgiveness

and compassion for everyone

who isn’t her.   

Only the edge   

is visible of the tightly spooled   

white miles   

of what is soon   

to be the torn off

inch by inch receipts,   

and the beam of green light in the black glass

of the self scanner   

drifts free in the space that is the sum

of the cost of all the items that tonight

won’t cross its path.

Registers of feeling too precise   

too intricate to feel   

except in the disintegrating

traces of a dream—

panopticon of cameras   

cutting in timed procession

from aisle to aisle

to aisle on the overhead screens

above the carts asleep inside each other—

above the darkened   

service desk, the pharmacy, the nursery,

so everywhere inside the store

is everywhere at once   

no matter where—

eternal reruns   

of stray wisps of steam   

that rise   

from the brightly frozen,

of the canned goods and food stuffs

stacked in columns onto columns

under columns pushed together

into walls of shelves   

of aisles all celestially effacing

any trace   

of bodies that have picked   

packed unpacked and placed   

them just so   

so as to draw bodies to the

pyramid of plums,   

the ziggurats   

of apples and peaches and

in the bins the nearly infinite   

gradations and degrees of greens   

misted and sparkling.

A paradise of absence,

the dreamed of freed

from the dreamer, bodiless

quenchings and consummations   

that tomorrow will draw the dreamer

the way it draws the night tonight   

to press the giant black moth

of itself against the windows

of fluorescent blazing.