The lighted streets look like letters —
I want to make words with them.
I want to transmute sprawling patterns
to simple sentences
to sprawling patterns.

I rarely know why —
I suspect it doesn’t matter,
but still I spend a minute staring
at neighborhoods’ looping drives,
tying knots with neurons.

We pass over Washington, Baltimore, New York.
Each city scrawls its esoteric message
to sleepless symbologists.
Each symbologist transcribes
in their own lost language.