Some image always starts it. Waking, there is a stairwell
twisting down to a dark sexy space you've never been.
Another whirls upward into the radiant gaggle of stars.
Either way seems to lead past the newspapers that are
dropped here & left to rot on the lawn. But you
never get to choose. Over the tops of old hills
the sun jabs down, slanted in a way that tells how
even this vaoult of an apartment can't secure the time.
A shy memory rings a bell. Then other, bolder
ones awake & rally behind it. Soon they will
come knocking with their understanding smiles,
their apocalyptic brochures, to evince the point that to
adopt the old ways will clear up "life" in a jiffy.
To ignore their advice is to risk a lunge into
the smoking fields, mired in battle, where it was
never clear for whose side you drew the bow.
The stakes aren't as high in our game, those voices say,
but at least they seem more personal. But this day,
each day, was to be an epic moment in your world:
when the murderous hordes of the quotidian
would at last be driven back by the grit
of your patience & truth of what you've been
reading, over & over, in different accounts:
that the tedium of dawn's arrival at the same
idiotic proof is wisdom after all. You thought,
one day, you'd wake up to it. Now the whole plan
is scrambled with your breakfast, as you realize,
"shit, I've got checks to sign, people to win over
to my mislaid cause, a towel somewhere for all this
perspiration of the human spirit." So the memories
cheer for you on you way to the bus-stop, where all
the days' loose ends rise: a paper-mache Hydra
built of old lover letters, & you with nothing but a pen.
It was not the fight you envisioned, but you take it
up anyway, scratching you & your lover's initials
on necks that long not so much to swallow you,
but to be sliced & divided in two, to reproduce until
there are enough of them to take you up & twirl
round you in a cocoon: a snack for the Gods,
deep in torpid winter, too cold & lazy
to hunt for tastier game. It's a good thing no one
gave you a knife, you realize, as the bus
squeals to a stop & the passengers ignore you
from their windows & the applause of time
roars of how you've yet to settle your account,
but that it's pleased with your sincerity & if
you keep on struggling, you'll no doubt someday
be stretched between the dots of the stars.
©Copyright Matt Miller