A cheap clock that stops mid-tick tells me more than the scowl
of a hooded figure with its scythe of evil intent
The spent battery no longer has the juice to keep the hands
of the timekeeper waving, hello, goodbye, see you later…
As a child I knew about movement, just as later I knew
moving inside a lover’s body was motion not to be feared
The woman smelled so differently, her voice changing in ways
that made a song, any song, lack primal sound
The slinking figure of fairy tale books was meant
to keep me from riding a tree limb into the stirrings
of the wind in the great oaks of a nearby park,
to keep me from flying if I could, to keep me
from talking back, from screaming a bitter truth
So what?, I told the old bag hiding inside her black habits,
if I tell you what you really look like, “and you, geezer,”
leaning over my desk that your breath smells of soot
and your theology means nothing more than a rancid belch
People like you sent me with a lie to lay in basecamp dirt
with a rocket curving towards me in a growl from the sky
I didn’t give the Halloween specter a single backward thought
What came to me was not to ask forgiveness or cringe in guilt
My own juices were flowing, finally flowing in arms and legs and teeth
as if the woman was next to me again and we were laughing,
“Now we’ll know if there’s an eternity or not!”
Not to know the outcome of our simple experiment, to be flattened
against gravel and dust, left for a lifetime to resolve the world’s insanities,
remains the great untested hypothesis 88
We will await another chance for the moon and sun to cross,
for coyotes to howl, for the shaman to spread his acrid smoke
between soldiers on the ground and the monsters of myth