—sometimes, for a breath
or a beetling beat or six, I feel
possessed with a sense that a
future self, some half-fleshed
fleck of me threshed from a
certain crepitant stalk, has 
gaily trepanned its way through my 
             pudding-skin spinal column
to put on a suite of scenes or something,
                            checking in
                            every prattling pocket 
                            for all of the proper 
 
   props—
 
this filigreed handkerchief crusted
here and here, all the colors of grated
sandstone sloughed from the opal-eyed 
sky beach, frail little rills of piano-rolled pips,
all waxen-white, wove into what grave 
parade of listing lines the internet told us 
resembled a wind whose name escapes me; six or so
 
scraps of a cigarette package, let’s say,
sixteen sticks and a hymen of snickering 
cellophane, bones perchance of some numinous 
creature, though I, in the future or otherwise, wouldn’t
begin to pretend to discern the difference ‘twixt
sheaf-wound wads of tobacco or savory
marrow tamped into an Indian ghost pipe; just
 
two gossipy slats of plastic gushing with 
everything evermore combed from a thumb-smudged
cherry cordial creasing the chest; some 
 
crumpled-up fives hardwon from wearing
these flour-caulked rags by a fly-picked pizza line; seven
 
soft surds I’ve hastily scrawled across
tortured receipts and lottery tickets tucked deep in the
tarrying bracken and lint; and this
 
Mary Ruefle I’m leisurely reading like one should 
          skim an eye over svelte bones of the hinting
                                                                   Tao Te Ching;
 
and the lot of it pinned to a niggling rent check
split from the scorched-earth pate of a slithering
lemniscate—
 
What was my motivation and could my
future-self discern just how to play it
and not knot what I had
      only assumed was so 
gingerly lain along dandling knees of a 
              cross-eyed cosmic seamstress,
              flossing her few frail teeth with—what is this,
              fly’s legs fording my life line?
 
It made me feel like wind-licked trees left
glibly assaying the weight of impending haze
that might just clot in a stormcloud,
stormclouds cracked into pearling tear-streaks
gamboling deep in redounding fountains fanned
before squirrel-lithe lights of a crackling theater
just having watched who perform as who performing
what grand, lavish, imaginal tasks of a titan, erstwhile
resurrected—gods thrummed out of the bristling
grass blades burst through cauls discarded, caulk,
and the chicken-skinned sidewalk blocks, bent
                  into a grin at a pitiless distance.