Go
on and go on again and get out
while you still have a chance. An ice pick in the eye
and by morning my frontal lobe is proceeding
in an orderly fashion to the nearest jar.
The comic book in me wants to believe
in some sort of salvation. The nineteenth-century
novel in my veins reminds me kryptonite
is not a mythological bird. I am spilling
my genre from both ends. In a makeshift tent
outside an old train station they are selling
pies, and shelling out placards and nostalgia
for free or for whatever it is we pay when we pay
the séance conductor or video recording
to reproduce an image of what we were
in some other time. Dear friends on the other side,
I can hear you calling out. We are safe
though less and less of what you knew each day.
The Hawthorne in me is squirming in the woods
somewhere, with the singular hope
that the inkling in my puritanical spine is false
or the debris from an acid trip. Go on
and go on. There are more worlds to be left behind.
From one day to the next I am a sentimental man.
I hold a history of these feelings in my heart, that burning
area in the middle of the chest that won’t let go.
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