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by Pat Nolan
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| LOST AND FOUND | Don’t worry about making it real
it’s all imaginary
windy and warm
a summer of days approaches
my leg is killing me
my arm is killing me
my head is killing me
my back is killing me
my foot is killing me
my hand is killing me
my gut is killing me
my butt is killing me
my etcetera is killing me
it’s enough to think
that there is a vast
conspiracy to kill me
by enlisting various
parts of my anatomy
sky scudding clouds
some bush league monomaniac
heat tsunami splashes me
with my own sweat
temps in the hundreds
the wilt factor
“wilt thou or won’t thou”
too hot to do anything
endure enforced leisure
I can’t deny I’m awake
though I’d rather still be sleeping
I’ve aged if only a dozen hours
subtly
who I am is not who I was
snatches from the music library
in my head of the tunes
about to play
as I insert the disc
I‘m remembering the future
and it’s disturbing
but that’s the nature of prophecy
throw on a shirt stride out the door
gray and tarnished leafed
dead tree like a column of smoke
against the mostly green hillside
workmen have spray painted
the dingy asphalt with lines and arrows
where they are soon to dig
(letter from the water company details all
not that I have to be happy about it
someone is feeding them infrastructure funds
I can already feel the cramp in my wallet)
joy can come in installments
a payment plan arranged by the senses
the burst of blossoms at the tip
of cane thick tendrils poking
through an otherwise well behaved
privet hedge the bees tiny
striped astronauts hover
over the radiating pistils
at the end of a long stretch
of shadow emerge into full light
past ivy clotted fence past where
someone has discarded a computer
monitor and a large luxury guzzler
blocks the driveway the many ways
thoughtlessness be made known
can it be my genius will become
the instrument of my destruction
that that
is its function
logic of the page violated
written down I often don’t
hear what I said
fresh faced into the morning breeze
language is as much
fiction as anything else
in one of those vague but exhilarating
Rousselian moments
it’s better if I don’t
pull back the drapes
on the verge of greatness
stubbed my toe numb
maybe that was
“snubbed by my toe”
the extremities always the first to leave
I may be getting better
“than what?”
mocks the echo |
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