The windows are trying to tell me something,
Which is clearly more important
Than whatever they have to say.
The evening timber planks
Were piles of glistening scrap at dawn,
Despite what people I suppose would claim –
Am I supposed to keep track of what won't stay put?
Everything will be gone if we look away for a moment,
That’s why there are guards, but they are ever
unreliable,
No one ever sees, for one, it’s only what tickles the
mind,
Like that red helicopter floating like a dragonfly that,
Depending on its assignment, exists now or does not,
It’s just something I experience, like that parking lot
Full of school buses, that may or may not be filled
With children, who may or may not be trapped.
It’s not my concern if what I’ve imagined can’t be
perceived
By others, or whether saving them would disobey
Some non-intervention treaty, and anyway the tumbleweed
The size of a trailer seems suddenly so much more
relevant,
Until I see some guy screaming for help and grabbing the
arms
Of anyone who comes to do so – he may be singing,
As the orderly claims, or sick in the head,
As the pills now heading his way conveniently suggest,
Or he may just be
possessed by friendly demons.
There’s no such confusion in his shadow, which looms like
Methuselah
In a trick of light, the kind the material world always
plays on us,
As if the 99.9% of matter that we can’t see
Can fit comfortably in that giant gray garage. How could
it,
In thinking about it, not be true? There are no rules for
anything
But the most obvious things, and most of those make no sense
at all;
The story unfolds without a moral or a plot – the characters
are
Sketched paper thin – but somehow we will ourselves to
guess wrong
The next twist, as if thought only turns up more nonsense
that can't
explain
explain
Why I end up alone in the station, and the low sun and
polished floors,
Their unintelligible words, makes me as happy as a
Labrador Retriever
Feeling the way to my name.
