Two Poems

Brainer Loner Princess Spy An apperceptive glance stalls the wall clock’s second hand. It’s my brain, paying out change. It’ll take a moment to explain. Enter the inventor of the time machine. Nerd alert! In no time an invisible hand places a pod inside every garage in suburbia. The flung Frisbee tracks the circumference of the earth. Precisely at Halley’s Comet’s perigee I cinch the cuff links on my rented pleated shirt. It’s not as if she said anything, she said something. But that something could be anything. What we don’t catch is the catch. In between times I’m wearing a wire under my tux underneath a northeastern sky undergoing sidereal collapse.   Closer Than Far, Far Away A shame about the swallows. Twice a year I play the lotto, on my birthday and the day I’m to die. Like fat Elvis, a Tuesday. Woman, O hard-headed woman walking up the sidewalk with a full-length acanthus-leaf mirror, I remember you blowing me a kiss even if you didn’t. Metaphysics is so hokey. The plot twists! You put your whole self in. You turn it all about. I was a new father before I figured it out: the bagpiper on the corner was playing the theme from Star Wars.