Cobblestone Streets

A small child unbuttons his black raincoat in front of me.
He is a phantom, a gust of glass, illuminating shards of dreams
that shimmer past us and explode in the street.
And as I pivot around to see
the golden youth of peasantry,
stricken with destitute, crumbling scenes
of wisdom poised in the current of a stream,
I only see emptiness, cobblestone streets,
pale apparitions in constancy of phantom dreams,
the moonlight refracted in rain-soaked mystique.