Pretend

Pretend plays
at conversation and desire.
Fiction masquerade
as flared out shirts
and hot days
sloppily mimicking
Rin Tin Tin
and wishing for
anything but that orchard
outside of Rochester
now that a Stuyvesant ramble
concaved in on all those
selves. Enjamb harder, my
self! Yet another metaphor,
a companion pretending to be
a single leaf on a bush.
The bush is not on fire. The
bush is burning? No. That 
was the myth, where
all these instructions
pretended to emanate
from.