The Novel

Liquid like silver and gleaming there,
Drooping wings and old clothes recovered,
Old caricatures of former bodies,
Ill-fitting and stretched as lost metaphors,
Antique allegories scrubbed fresh with your nostalgia.

Stripped of poetry and gloss,
Ten years before and behind and through,
This hollow picture remains
Without right or easy ways for
This,
My current substance,
To step into the old shoes,
To burst the laces:
The things I know and
The ways I'm real and
All the virtue and strength and things you never saw
But that were never concealed or hidden under the bed
Or taped shut in some old shoebox.

These pages flip as if written in violet ink,
A tribute to your last and lost, your repeating self,
The pictures you snapped so long ago,
Fading and melting to plastic as old Polaroids do
When left out in the sun
Or rain
Or held over a forgotten flame.