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If the lies we told got any more honest
we would not be believed, thus
when I say I was staring at you,
tall, mop-haired and looking through
the dismembered Times
because you look like an acquaintance
I haven’t seen in a while, it is
important that you be a foot shorter
and without the great girth of head
that led him to front a band called APE
and get arrested anonymously
in the capital, living only on orange juice
for five days. For some it is no struggle
to see the familiar in the strange—maybe
it comes of imagining the refrigerator
as a rocket if we could only fit! but no—
there are too many supplies. Now
you are gone. What would the sky
feel like, anyway, if we could just
ride a refrigerator toward where
we saw a lamp fall from high in the west?
Can a toaster grow back the bagger’s
missing hand and so double his bag-packing
productivity or sprout from her scored knees
new legs on the woman at the bus stop?
She’s sitting alone at the bus stop! With no
helpful appliances! and I’m applying
my foot to the gas pedal as if late
for a wedding. Then you changed
into a smallish red-haired girl
wearing a football jersey and a fedora
sitting down at my table as if I hadn’t heard
many times already about 13 year olds
diving into a pool of substance abuse
after compelled fellatio for the creepy
next-door neighbor—it is a familiar awfulness,
but there is no strange registry annotating
devices suitable for rendering savaged tugboats
into sagacious dolphins—perhaps
if I concentrated long enough, if I looked
into each with supreme focus, I would turn into
a washing machine, air conditioning, a waffle iron,
the as-yet uninvented finally applied,
of some use when you wish to ascend.
Marc McKee
*****************
:hi:
RL
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