CATECHISM

...and slid down the invisible glass wall of life.
Just like that, bam! pow! poetry erupts
out of the unexpected, the prosaic,
the conjurer’s quotidian canvas,
& the heart, agape, responds in kind.

I want to turn kings & queens into fans,
cutting & shuffling like a magician,
a card sharp, a criminal on the side
of the angels. I want to deceive you,
& feel your arms around my deception.

Besides love, it’s all I’ve ever wanted.
To turn language into a hat upon
a table, & to lift it, revealing
neither the head nor the tail of a coin,
but a solid block of ice. A miracle

of rare device. I want to astonish
you, & find in the light of your delight
the reflection that obliterates self,
that obliterates phrases like I want,
that obliterates the hours it took,

the endless hours of patience, practice,
to fool you so completely with the truth
that hides inside, a terrified rabbit.
Who is the poet? One who re-enchants
the disenchanted. What is the poet?

The one who never reveals the secret.
When is the poet? During the moment
of misdirection. Where is the poet?
Right before your eyes. Why is the poet?
I’ll tell you in just a minute, but first:

Pick a card. Any card. 

YOUR SEARCH FOR THE OPPOSITE OF MEMORABILIA RETURNED NO RESULTS

It's all gone, it's always going, & then
you lose even the trace of it: one day,
you hear a sound from the other room
& find yourself sweeping up glass, angry
& mystified. Entropy shrugs, a shrug
that never ends, an event horizon
of shoulders in perpetual spasm,
space on one like an angel & time
on the other with its little pitchfork.
Goddammit, you growl, glowering at glass
turned back by gravity to grains of sand,
glittering against woodgrain in the light
of another terminally late afternoon.
Your hand—every hand—now nothing but
a dustpan... & then it's gone & you walk
barefoot through the room as if to taunt
the rupture of both the mundane & of
memory. In my heart it will remain,
my stadust melody... The heart hates
entropy, says the mind, as another
memory fails somewhere inside the gray.
The shards shimmer as they slide into
the trash. And we've got get ourselves back
to the landfill, you sing, & then you laugh,
a sound like the cracking of river ice. 

HE WAS A REAL CATARACT, YOU KNOW?

You know, we won't always have this view,
he said softly from behind closed eyes.
The best lie is a truth that isn't true.
You know, we won't always have this view.

Inside this black box, the sky is still blue.
I'm sure you understand what this implies.
You know, we won't always have this view,
she said sadly, closing his clouded eyes.

THE LONELY REPAIRMAN

Everyone is looking
for a fix, a solution
for the insoluble,
the universal caulk
for infinite cracks.
Surely this mirror
does not reflect
ourselves. Surely
the fault lies with
the manufacturer,
the given… but what if
the defect only lies
in eyes & not in
particles once waves,
waves now particles.
It isn’t that the world
is broken so much as
it’s a priceless vase
forever falling,
shattering, forever
rising & reassembling,
always different,
always the same.
It is what it is, always
depending on what your
definition of is
is. But I

am always on call.
I will come to your home
between the hour of
& the hour of. It’s all
in a day’s work, every
day’s work, every hour,
every clock running down,
winding up, the wound
in the wound. I
don’t mind.
Really,
I don’t.

ECHO OH

It wasn't the same.
It wasn't the same.
It was different.
It was night & day.
It was Day for Night.
It was something else,
sunset in a glass
of rye, an orange
rhyming with itself.
It was a sunrise
that couldn't get high
because it was high.
It was fire & ice.
It was fire & rain.
(Ever seen the rain?
Yes, yes, & the fire.)
It was some say, some
say. It was something,
all right. It was this,
the one thing that. It
happened. It happened,
& then it didn't.

I can't repeat it.
I can't repeat it.
I can't repeat it.
It was only here.
It was never here.
It was always here.
It was for no one.
It was just for me,
& me alone, me
alone, alone, a—