Collect your flashlights to set up camp in the dark.
Put your gear on a cart at the pier to embark
For a planet of ice run by bureaucrats where
The president smiles and pulls out his hair.
The radiator whispered I should leave but I declined.
Furniture rearranged itself; sofa arms linked and let out the cat.
Nothing to read but baseball news with the front page excised
And an old number of Jailer magazine, the prison trade rag.
While searching for my cell in a Subaru’s backseat
I fell asleep. When I awoke the street was dark and someone
Was opening the door. Be not afraid said the stranger
Or might have if I hadn’t bolted from there like a bat.
Dull office afternoons of unpleasant expectations,
A cloud of dirty confetti pushed out to sea
Leaving me a tiny dot on a timeline stretching infinitely
Back to a smudged past and forward to a darkening future.
Cross the canal at low tide, climb easily on the drawbridge
Counterweights, lose a sandal in the muddy bank.
Make a choice at a crossroads beneath the trees:
A white knit coat with a French dictionary in the pocket,
A crunchy fish like a crab that is eaten while it’s still alive,
A lawnmower that one rides behind a Japanese boy
From Armco Steel to Monroe High.
En route examine a sunflower mutated from exposure
To pollutants until it resembles a squashed basketball.
Stand on the roof and strain to see fireworks shrouded in smog.
Like the panic of finding a kid in the trunk of a borrowed car,
Or a waterbug I couldn’t squash with a wet newspaper
The future used to offer so much fun
Our closets would be bigger than our bedrooms.
How happy to be riding in an open car, sunny Brooklyn
Floating past my elbow like Oz, down the rabbit hole
And off to school through a secret library passage
To a natural nether world where I traced arabesques
In the air unafraid of the ever-changing technology.
I kept my balance and turned on the lights.
A seagull, a pigeon and I, another common bird,
Shared the sheltered river sun on a frigid afternoon.
Recent Comments