Illustration by Shaina Cohen

Yesterday I hung “The Sadness Of The King” on the wall with two nails and two picture hangers. The atmosphere in the room changed instantly. My mood turned rapid and tall, like an escalator kicking up sparks from a fire. Epiphany burning in a truth palpable as scissors. Pieces of colored paper. An old man’s hands cutting a genie out of gouache. Mettle in red, wisdom in green, composure in blue. Equations of sunlight and glue.

It is reassuring and sweet to believe space is curved. Yesterday’s sandwich is not today’s sandwich. A perfect sandwich cannot be assembled out of cold cuts and pumpernickel. The distinction between the beautiful and the ugly has a social aspect. We all occupy different rooms. Patterns, corollaries, categories. Insights kindled with nuance.

The world is a bucket of possibility crackling with cause and effect. Hence, poetry. Language mangled into collarbones. Windows speckled with rain. Mica poking out of a wallet full of identity and age.

There is nothing more baroque than human reproduction. Later, there is a dilation of anger and bone. Writing heaves with instincts. A shadow broken from its eyes and sifted through the debris of a necktie.

Television refrigerates children. One should give them an ethics of action and involvement. Luggage in intricate stars. Crickets immersed in music. A dagger of light draped in black velvet.

The waves come in slowly at first, surge into waves that are grasped with furious paddling. It is the most elusive thing in one’s existence. A red Pontiac with a dream-catcher hanging from the rear-view mirror making a left into a cemetery.

A bruise. A weave. A cat in the kitchen window.

Thracian helmet in a funeral home.

A flurry of blossom on Bigelow.

An old man looking for an address.