This is the certainty
of your sorrow
in today’s newspaper
A sapling
has tried growing again.
It will end up
under the leg of a stool
It is green, this stool, this leg,
made of plastic
There is a bigger sense
of wrongness now
Most times, it is
the essence
of all this.
The only bubble in a puddle,
The big one, the color
of creamed coffee, the teaser,
-prick me and I will show
you how to disappear-
But that’s not it,
Only the funeral march
is certain
Chopin is the fiddler
on the roof of my head
and he stops
every once in a while
at sundown and sun-up
rooster-style.
It is dark again,
Like May in rain.
No weddings
for foxes today
or fairies in search of
girls with lung diseases
They’re all probably dead,
anyway,
that’s not it either.
This will go on,
Until I get a new
swivel chair, with black
everythings.
with hooded strangers
in a large hall
built for strangers,
weird, black, and round eyed
That would be strange-
A strange day,
that would be
Let it come.
Then I wait,
attaching myself
to a piece of furniture.
I wish to be sat upon.
The question is-
losing itself inside
my bowels,
practicing its vowels.
Let it find its own way
to being sat upon-
while I wait-
I’m making a guitar
out of my ribs,
or a violin, perhaps
With it, I will play
my version
of the funeral march.
And I will see the boy
I saw in the mirror today,
His smile framed
in a glass window
he’d lay there,
home at last
in a large shoebox
made of wood.
