Vertigo

By Paul Cameron Brown

We’re travelling down a carnival road, are met at intersections by
varying faces: poets as eyes in collapsed black holes, even the
universe as extension of the stellar poet. Then, they are transformed,
become worm-pickers, masons, longshoremen who subsidize their
poetry with the real task at hand: making waste, laying trestles
instead of women to prove a point.

This is necessary. I’m defending it, find it both believable and
interesting. Meanwhile, troubadours and wandering minstrels eke
out a living on storybook memories, join Marco Polo if he ever
lived. Seek out the Great Khan in a box of cookies or within a
magnum of champagne depending on circumstances.

The Grand Lunar is watching. Her pallor commands true poets to
roll over, gaze at silver buttocks make a commitment to the art
beyond spray painting, ghost watching, navel gazing.

The sky is the final home of the soul, the Sage himself a wanderer
announced.

It was a warm spring evening. Lilac bounded from antler brown
twigs only recently inert. Everything dissolved at once into crying.
The world itself became a tear.

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