“Time may be an abstraction, but it makes the days go by.” – John Koethe.
Imagine, if you will, that I were not
an acolyte
among the living,
my days more than a catechism
of routine. From the nasturtiums
floating face-up
in their glass bowl
to the window that shattered
that summer I was broke. I go on
exhausting years
on the unknowable.
Consider how easy it is to look up
from your half-eaten
breakfast with its drying riverbed of yoke
and compromised toast
to stare out
at the interstate as if in prayer,
the waitress transfixed
as well, her
coffee-pot suspended
in mid-air… we interrupt this
American morning to bring you
a moment of desperate
reflection.
Everyday laying down
little pronouncements.
Examining the artifice
of my life like some multi-faceted gem;
not beautiful exactly, but curious. Foreign
in the way delusion is strange
and familiar at the same time – an alien
notion setting up
a homestead in the mind.
Harbinger
of the great ego crash to come.
In spite of judgments
skidding across
my thoughts like hard rain,
It’s one articulation
after another. In spite of my heart
clattering its tin cup
along the bars of its cage.
Did I mention that which leaves
one empty? Devoid
of any fullness
that might have mattered
in its time?
Jarring insights, illumination
that washes over you
like cold water – and then…
a trip to the dump, the aching
overhead lights
of a drugstore, a void
where your mother’s voice used to be.
Photo By: Diego Iaconelli
