I miss you already,
the sun-kissed daisy
whispered to the migrant
flake of snow,
which clung
like a hopeful bead
to the daisy’s
delicate petal
before dying a lover’s death
and melting.
And then came the day
when he realized he was free,
always had been
to enjoy the abstracted
stage-play of his thoughts
and their formations,
something of an idiot’s delight,
same as the scabbed-glass opera
of the world without,
its tragedies and follies
swaddled in petticoats
of burlesque
(the people burning—
Take it off, take it off)
how interesting it all was,
how thoroughly enjoyable
it was to be alive,
a mortal gob of wax engaged
to the briefest of candle-flickers
in the ceremonial scheme of dark and light,
how much he would miss himself—
who he was, who he was not—
when he was gone,
when his persona had melted
into a puddle of anonymous molecules
that had to be on their merry, migrating way
(goodbye vagabond molecules!)
while his very last thoughts
might plants the seeds
for a brand-new play
starring god knows who
in some crumbling, time-clipped tenement
of Eternity
where, AT PRESENT,
was an immutable law
and not just a parenthetical
stage direction.
The Martians,
in their conscious longevity,
stamped our passports
and immigration documents
long before our legacy of amnesia
broke
and we came to realize
that everything, including our sense of planetary privilege,
has been a sham, a lost man’s desperate invention,
and while some wept and wondered, and wandered with nowhere to go,
others kept right on,
working their jaws religiously,
in chewing stick after stick of savior chewing gum,
which apparently becomes the stickiest stuff on earth
when engaging contact with foreign matters,
and other things true
to the calling of home.
John Biscello 