Someone else
once described poetry
as the practiced revelation
of subjects ordinarily marked
for concealment, but no one
buys it so why bother
sourcing the quote. “It” must be
ok for me to steal, I excuse myself.
Time and time again
I excuse myself.

Let’s say
for the sake of shaky
foreshadowing that the door
to everything I didn’t do in life
is straight across
the footworn hall from everything
I did—that The Did and The Didn’t are
lifelong neighbors, occasionally
getting each other’s mail, riding
the same elevator or climbing
the same stairs, walking
the same corridors and sidewalks, passing in
the same streets, noticing
one another, exchanging
pleasantries perhaps, talking
about the weather
since the weather
is revelation but you don’t have
to take sides. This is the way
things are, they each announce
once the doors close behind them, so
might as well have a little sneaking
peering peek through the keyhole
at what the market will bear, actual
and imagined.

When I
finally saw the sun, it was
far more _____ than it had
ever been in crayon. Condemned
to see the particulars, I’ll think
about the rest of my life
later because tonight my steps
for once feel firm across
the wood floor with its
creaks and cracks, a substantiation
that inspires me in a flash
of poetism to affect a posture
of gracefully uncertain, fatigued
defiance—this is everything I have
left at night as sleep awaits.

Sleep awaits
and choice has brought us
here, I think, the actual stupidly
collapsed in a corner after banging
on the walls all day
because the imagined isn’t across
the hall at all, he’s next door
carousing, suffering, enjoying, lamenting,
enduring his own facts with
the volume up too high. Time and
again
in the midsts of revelation and
concealment
and it’s here, back to sleep, done
in action and coming undone
in speech as I playfully murmur some
solipsisms about having met most
of the people I could’ve been.