metes and bounds

I walk every day.
I’ve measured the city by metes and bounds:
If eyes over surfaces scoured, like skateboard wheels,
Curbstones and benches (avoiding eye contact)
Pavements and mailboxes, manholes and bus stops,
All would be pockmarked and powdered
With scrutiny.

My maps head-height like most;
No sense gawking upward.
Yet more often I’m hunting for paper:
The torn leaves of writing that sting of rejection,
Balled wads of notebook-ruled, tossed aside litter
The carefully folded reminders, now lost.

Grocery store -- parents' notes --
Red-faced looseleaf naming names,
Passed in class; directionless missives
In eye-gutters clinging:
Can you discern
Class from handwriting,
parse out the prude, the perverted,
the passionless lists in mechanical pencil --

Or love.
The broken rarely keep their cold dismissals,
Though they’re worn, from prying hard between the lines;
Hand-creased, palm printed, the ink absorbed to bone.
The pleading scratch, cross out,
To spin what’s futile into hope.

Love notes are rarely lost.
Burning in breast pockets, everyone keeps their proof
From prying eyes.

I gather to me the unwanted.
Hardly anyone scatters the ashes of what they desire.
No one lucky ever goes unloved;
No unlucky bastard has a pocket that’s secure
Or a hand uncramped from cold
Or a moment on the street to pause,
And look ahead –
His shoes pinch and his bus runs late,
His nerveless fingers lose their hope
And paper parts from memory, dormant
Til resurrected and re-read.