A window that cared deeply
about the railroad in its breast.
There was a Catherine wheel in the back yard
and a Cassandra in the guest house, paid.
All our forks were wooden.
But all our knives were copper.
This created an incredible sexual tension
between our implements at mealtime.
Later, we gilded even the mice
we beheaded in our traps.
This was when we really arrived.
This was the glorious period in which
nobody knew us
(but the ferrets that slunk
around our naked breasts).
In deep middle of the night,
when museums talk to themselves,
all the artifacts, suits of armor
and stuffed tapirs, ask each other
back and forth, in frightened
whispers, “Am I crazy?”
I want to mischievously send you a photo of you as you were
long ago. When I knew you. When I so much more
than knew you. It will come out of the personal blue,
from a bogeyman’s slingshot, a shot in the dark, an idiom
which admits the dark has agency, weird intent,
as I had for you, and you intense for me. Once.
Once isn’t the right word for something that happened
so many times, but it will haunt and have to do,
and it strikes just the right note of an asshole ghost.
theprosepoem 