A KIND OF LIFE

I follow the wind in the trees until fast asleep.
Not chaos exactly but maddeningly precise.
How can I not envy its lines and contortions,
This absence that hosts and brings us so near
Here, still in a personal dark without arrival?
Unutterable apologies for cares I cannot name.
Forms tendril away while fixing to narrows.
Impartial elegance devouring the way I feel.
Staged energies compete to pierce the actual.
Are we now finally fully divorced from reality?
It turns out, we turn out the way we turn out.
I hid the details to reveal the feel of details—
As in a realm abstraction might converge upon,
Washing potatoes in ocean water before the fire.

I HAD TO GO NOWHERE

Daydreams rush by as landscapes in a menagerie of light.
I do not know what I’m doing, or how, when I do what I do.
Starved of passion, mercilessness alters desperation feeding
On what it corrodes. All images agree in the dark. Each thing
Bears on its surface a chronicle, form tells form what form
Is, an arbitrary way of being alone, no matter how tenuous,
A construct in a technical dilemma wanting accuracy without
Representation. All points both are and are not an accident—
To know how to make, anything one makes, it’s by accident.
Life foresees death, yet hardly lives it out as death foresees,
Transformed by the actual. One knows only a little of what
The point will be. One wants order, but one wants it to come
By rules of chance distractions, a reconstitution of facts tearing
Time away from time with luck and a cocktail of distortions.

BELLING THE CAT

When you have nothing left, I will ask for more.
That’s what the world says at least, not me—
But maybe. A shrill emerges from the muck.
The ultimate comeback kowtows to the dawn.
Shall we try to shy away from the triumvirate—
Unfastidious, coeternal, and consubstantial?
Rambling strange procedurals recalls the dead
Curbing appearances to once every five hundred
Years in a dull array of futureless, livid men
Who slouch and loaf toward bedlam Bethlehem.
Aftersounds from afar, the venerable ridiculous
Mouse from the mountain in labor is born
Whole among a heaping of delectation of flesh—
The price tag is possibly indistinct from host.

Aaron Fagan was born in Rochester, New York, in 1973 and is the author of A Better Place Is Hard to Find (The Song Cave, 2020), Echo Train (Salt, 2010), and Garage (Salt, 2007).