Which choice would be the more regrettable

after enough lost time let one reflect

and recognize that, yes, a choice was made;

to have spent all of sparse free time chasing

an art for which one had no aptitude,

yielding chaff, nothing appreciable, or 

instead to have spent sparse free time chasing

an art for which one was well suited, showed 

real talent, and with it, might have composed  

an oeuvre worthy of approbation,

with more, in retrospect, than sparse free time 

left for the chase? One, having since made one’s 

mindless and enduring choice, might rather

not know, still suspects one or the other.

The box jiggled, as if to call a dog,

recalled a riddle, that was only posed 

in response to its own late solution:

Will a completion reimposed bypass 

the cognitive burden that is newness,

reconfiguring a puzzle become

less a painstaking effort to locate 

fractions of a head-scratching absence as 

memorizing the products of matched sets 

of projections and sockets? Yes and yes;

and learning not but how to wisely learn,

heartening, as every piece connected 

simplifies the task remaining, limits 

possibilities, until there are none.

The light so late, a novelty, the shared

apartment wall’s blind counterpart, nascent 

cloudburst, was in fact many lights, staggered

exponents of the acrobats’ accord;

streetlights, headlights, windows across the way,

the moon converged in one uncanny gas

obliquely and blanketed the courtyard. 

No sound; non-scream, blood-heavy pyramid

of basal apprehension reported

treed balloons. As shoeless cricket-hours

home-intruded casting slideshow horrors,

rams and lambs perpetually filed 

up the fire escape, embroidering

reticent Mylar as nothing happened.

A fan of deli roses meets tile,

reorients in time: a viable

day bed, after the drop-leaf descended,

on which the dinette’s ponds of filth prevail

until glass is broken, and respite loosed

our song, prisoned under harmful ore and

yet paring unique agony with strained

genericism. While our deciding 

that a meal, say, or argument remain 

incomplete brought that argument or meal

to its close, your voidance let your biding

remittance thrive. The fiddle-leaf fig roosts

in your lees; all else I’m left’s a diamond,

quick to lose the value it pretended.

Absent peeking tip of bookmark, page ends 

minimally parted, distinguishing

having finished it from having never

started outburdens diverse colored tabs

in the contents, text, and the appendix;

the smoothed out dog-ears of former tenants

beckon obscurely; these distrait riddles

(did I quit halfway or stash my receipt

in the middle?) augment our abstracted

sight; readers misled through veins of aligned

spaces toward passages already read,

across countless jejune mysteries, seed

context for a final twist: They just might

have accidentally read the same book twice.

Did I deserve what I received? As much 

as baby deserves her bottle (or is 

admission an absolution?): Surely;

but did I deserve to deserve it? Well,

choice being the merely proportionate 

illusion of choice; maybe. In practice 

you’ve already won or lost; in practice 

you’re nothing but a voice in your own ear

with all the volition of a raindrop: 

Atoms, set in motion, set in motion

atoms; retraceable, predictable

surely someday soon, or surely never,

by supercomputers so prescient as

to meet most definitions of a god.

A scolding faith; a discourse between hands,

in a precarious house assembled 

from cushions and blankets, about holding:

Gold rings, unchaperoned, set faithfully 

in a clay dish intended for hand soap,

itself set precariously within 

the bathroom sink drain’s vertiginous draw,

gleam in absent context, a clinging to 

abstraction: loose if not yet lost, released

before release; in the face of fingers

that scrabble hypothetically after 

their precious metaphor, or metaphors,

a slippery ring is holding out hope 

for static grace in a dish for hand soap.

Vacant nights without compression of sleep,

crutch of irony, touchstone of motif,

climax in one’s own circular brainwash

undermining postdated peace of mind. 

Torrential spare time, wasted debating

the usefulness of unsparing debate,

sums with the cadence of vacillation:

stay with me stay with me leave me alone;

courteously allow that I must sleep

uncuddled by one who’s having trouble

uncuddling, who when I go take a leak

alerts the presumptive neighbors, shouting,

   “In your scant absence, I am loving you;

   love wakes!” through the cold plaster of my pique.

Sagging walls built who knows by whom or when

squat in icy creek, centipede birchwood

zoetrope beyond highway trash collage

on the cusp of glacial restoration.

Sagging walls, built who knows by whom or when.
   Road a curtained whizzing, around just-deep-

   enough-you-could-get-lost guerrilla 

   campsite in centerless clearing, morning

   tipped more than one obtrusive deer or bear,

   snuffling, against our tent. So deftly 

   did we shy headlong into placebic 

   muffle and darkness of our sleeping bags

   we couldn’t, until they were gone, be sure 

   whether or not they’d gone, or what they were.

Anticipation of the punishment:

The punishment. The punishment meted

a diffusion, oddly disappointing…

Will you call my mother? The sleight-of-hand 

punishment has parceled its glimmer-work

and out-transcended adolescence’s

unrecollected textual vacuum. 

Whether from myself or from all of you,

my secrets… those absurd tufts of pubic 

hair nearly comical in contrast to 

exclusive tan lines, discolored privates,

sex’s effect on the presexual,

the sense of a dissection folded and 

refolded... are nothing but sexual.

It was the rain, I guess, or private flux

I trod: Two cents I wasn't meant to hear

exchanged burrowed deep into my pockets;

upset my damp, complacent certitude:

“Should I not have said I miss them/him/her?

Rather, should I have said I miss us/you?”

I don't have to feel bad, but I do; worse

for taking the stairs too fast, staying on

amends dredged from the bottom of your purse:

How else could I pretend not to pretend 

that you can’t hear me when I'm all alone

in our apartment, to be glad I could 

not be, just like I'm glad that you happened

on me instead of choosing someone good?

I can't feel my wedding ring and lose it.

Did I lose it? Is it on my right hand 

(sometimes I move it to my thicker right 

ring finger when it feels a little loose 

[from the cold – finger shrinkage] on the left…)? 

I've lost it (...because one time it flew off

my left hand in the shower and I was 

stricken; positive, as I listened to 

it ping around the tub [I remember

my eyes were closed. I must have been washing 

my face, I guess, or hair], that it would fall

unrescuably down the drain)! But then,

there it always is. As a precaution,

I shove my hands deep into my pockets.

Forward or back, the time machine wasn't 

   truly a time machine, it could merely

   bring you to a past or future present. 

Time machines travel through time, not through space.

   To find our old favorite diner, I first 

   had to visit the new one in its place.

“I’d like to go back and…” before I say

   “try it over again,” I waver, for fear 

   I'd do it a second time the same way. 

I’ll revisit the things that could have gone wrong 

   but didn't; leapfrog ten years when waiting

   to learn from the same mistakes takes too long.

I’ll give it all up to go back again;

   then, I’ll have nothing, not even my wish 

   to give it all up to go back again.

Arriving trains announce loud times to come;

on departing, they drive their sound with them.

   Paralyzed by the urgency to move,

   you've encountered a station you hadn't 

   foreseen, and its radical harmonics 

   could explain the beauty, clear if distant,

   fixed upon the face of every stranger  

   on the train. But, if you’d joined the elect,

   in eternal life’s excesses, passing

   your train's true destination, only you'd 

   yet to be informed of your election,

   why would, on such a favored subway car,

   no one look in your direction? Why are

   their faces less beautiful than before?

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