FUme LAPSE

5:52: a pigeon with a leaf hat. Air raid signal at Target. Long-haired elders in camo. No, the other shade of camo.

*

Language pays it forward, I steal it back. Summer fog travels downwards, real estate upwards. The reason I forgot to call you: a kaleidoscope grinding care into the whole sky, clear and scattered as a mirror.

*

15 minutes on one page, clicking on letters with my eyelash. Best burpless mega fatty delivery capsules. I follow the Roomba in my mind.

*

Days commute into each other. After the rain, leaves sing, and the whole great century suffers, because it does not know if the past has ceased to exist, or simply ceased to be useful. Historical light declines to a Rainforest Cafe mist. Blueish tint of glass in the 90s. (The actual 90s).

*

Which literally means scent is time’s residue. On the sheets of a former life, not lemons but yellow rippled flowers, a scent not literally lemon. I prefer to smell dawn but it’s stormy.

*

I prefer to walk off the turns, cresting purple sirens. I’ll go to a bank so that there’s still safety. I’ll touch the slightly stuck light switch so there are still bodies. With any luck, I’ll meet myself on this street in a series of regrets and sudden radios, whose song is wide enough to cover us at least in time.

*

Days commute into each other. You’re one to speak. On command, but whose. This parking garage pagoda: “It’s kind of a god’s god.”

*

Firehose in an ornate dumpster. MoMa de Chao (Automania). “Mystic, poet, jester” (an ad).

*

Writing, I smell him. My great-great grand-fume. When there are vents, tube-like passages at which stars appear, I remember.

*

Overhanging trees holding shadows. Outside my window: “I’m drained. I’m drained. I’m drained.”

—

from Fume Lapse–published as Urizen 2

Buy it by DMing Joshua?

(Also: this poem previously appeared in the gr8 Tagvverk)

—

Joshua Wilkerson is a writer from Texas. He is the author of Meadowlands/Xanadu/American Dream (Beautiful Days, 2022) and The Keeper, forthcoming this year from Ugly Duckling Presse. He is a PhD student in English at the CUNY Graduate Center.