From In the Company of Words
Past Tents Press
$12, 114 pp.
And I arrived there with open eyes
glued to the light, too real, fading
and rising all aglow, staking speechless
claims about useless principles
in full view of other watchers
whose stripped smiles and lazy eyes
brought shame and starched pleasures
She stepped up, releasing
her three-pronged souvenir
"cleansing the stiffened air" singing
sadly, changing the tempo
and the scene altogether. I whimpered
fanatically to myself — a man denying
the rooms between his imagination's walls.
