6 Train Dining

Front car plunging tunnel-mouth, he gnaws unneat,
   no front teeth, this mendicant’s midnight meal
   of chicken legs, bones stacked about his feet
   in tidy, graveless piles on subway steel.
How many bone heaps have you known so placed
   as if reserved to plant and not to lye,
   like peach pits but on plates shoeprint-faced,
   canine-scraped where once was flesh but sucked dry?
White exposed like wedding bands collected
   from campward trains: identical, de-maned,
   a form of loveletting dissected;
   he covets pured bones, not meat nor left hand.
As if the goal of eating were to clean
   and retrieve unkillable bits between.

— 2011