Time seizes my chest with both hands,
demands to be properly smelled, and
places my face in a giant carton of
rosemary. Lavenders flash through
my mind, unburdened by the wet
spring, sparse but insistent, searching
for perennial proof. Space inserts itself
halfway between me and where I thought
to be being, and again halfway as I approach,
not worried about senses, conscious of
wisecracks about Zeno and never being
totally erased. Conservation of matter
is a spatter on the chalkboard, and those
erasers take a beating while they refuse
to be wet. Overhead projectors and slides
ride the Millennial mind distracted by post-
post-modernism, at the mailbox, incorrectly
addressed with the pan-optical context of
a prison whose prisms refract sentences
and end up verse. Book skeptics stare at
narrators cynically, unwilling to unbelieve
the mark of a good watch is a restless,
sleepless night. Fight it, according to the
wrestlers with wolves, the unspilling,
unshattered glass on which was written:
rage and the whole will become light
with pieces and darkness bright.
Roman Ryan 