An Interlude of Inches

It is your duty, now

You've scrubbed and rinsed and fretted

To wring the whole turquoise, light freckled sea of a vacation

Out of a towel you intend to throw away

The moment you can stomach searching for its replacement

Your morning has already gone to work

Routine is waiting outside to enslave you

You must make everything in the slim shop of this second

Hear a sumptuous symphony in an unmarried note

Nothing more than an echo of its own bashful boredom

The uncomfortable ping that announces unnecessary messages

Claim that sound, let it be your board hour to tread

It is your note, anonymous as any awaiting alpha layout

Dream the size of the sea of unmarked keys

Awaiting their umlauts and ampersands

How interchangeable in their flat silence, these vacant saddles

Fantasizing about the slow descent of the most divine of asses

The letter is everything

What meaning would a key have, without it?

How useful is a signet ring

Blank as a stare?

Poking sealing wax with silent squares?

Your note

Like every key that aspires to literacy

Is meaning's real abode

It is the stage where everything is played

It is the small, square house

Of signification

Make something of it

You will have to go back to work tomorrow

Shrink your soul and sneak inside this second

Instead of whining and petulant demands

That the world suit you just perfectly

Suit yourself to it

Look into every corner of the small time box

Find just the right way to bake a sweet potato

Perform the making of it as a haughty hierophant

Presiding over the ritual sacrifice of tangerine tubers

To the mysterious and powerful god of exaggeration

Let that music massage your marrow as familiar digits do

Teach your ear to listen to what it can't recall not hearing

Make every moment into a scandalous postcard

If only because of what it helped you understand

Thermonuclear joy can crawl inside half an afternoon

And hide like a giddy lunatic of a child

Trembling inside the fact that he cannot wait for her to find him

So that they can both shake the world with their cries of counterfeit surprise

Hands joined, they will wheel around the audacity of how they dare

Imagine the laughable animal that would wear green shag carpeting as a pelt?

This summer afternoon sunlight is also touching Belfast and Beirut and Brazzaville

This sofa, this armchair, these vague decorations

This smell of frantic attempts to scrub surfaces

Into sparkling amnesia

After tiny humans have had their unsupervised way with them

Their way is a loud, filthy carnival of laughing tears

Niagaras of noisy nasal mucous

This moment is as quotidian and generic as an unmarked key

As fleeting and strong as any unforgettable story

All of the wonder is wound up in the fact that they are in on it

Feral cubs of knowing roll between their clumsy grins

He knew she would find him, biting his thumb to keep

From squealing with standard delight

She knew he knew she would find him

Shy sherlocks are always everywhere

They were in on it, this small thing, together

The game's time ballooned to blot out planets

That is what closed the circuit

Hide and seek

In all of the trivial time

Life wriggles laughing through it

It can make any contraband minute

You hide for a special occasion

When you are unoccupied

Fit for lights, and camera worthy action

Down, off, free, me

So many neighbors of the mystery of time

If it is yours alone

It waits to be the setting of sacred spectacle

Do not disappoint

Murder mundane routine in act one

Find a fortune and a phone number in its pockets

See what happens