in the corner of a circle...

the astrophysics of childhood

a mattress and box spring

might have fallen off

a Schrödinger's cat-movers

truck in the middle

of the desert stretching

through a winter’s night

they were still wrapped in plastic

when we came upon them

I said, remove the mattress tags first

eat everything before time has hands

crawl through the lattice of water

piss on the teeth of rakes

skim the eyes of windows when windy

look for viable physics

when remembering childhood

is ballast mostly

in a world of clocks

someday is just a wish

to permanently tune out

the ugly parts

to know vaudeville and

ten penny freak shows

are where Shakespeare

is at his best reflection

of the human condition

the highways from carriage and

curtain to speed and plastic certainty

bend intentions from something round

to the sharp edge of a trapeze

life in the thinnest possible margins

something observed as a gather

slow increments bunched

increasingly tighter

with more torque

ready to be spun into tales

the older we become

even the kingdom archaea

has a language all its own

their poems are heat and energy

left like ghosts

in a cytoplasmic streaming

of dreams through cellular machinery

we pay homage to the ways

we don’t always need the air

we breathe when taking a flight

of fancy or reprieve

we wish we dream we conceive

something beautiful inside us

something someday that needs

to be seen like the Nazca lines

something that is just another

poet’s poems in the limestone

another folded laminate

for the stars to see

we see them just fine

and not at all like tourists do

EJR ©