Adam Fitzgerald

After Cyndi Lauper I’m in the barricade hearing the clock thickening you. Autumn encircles a confusion that’s nothing new. Flash back to warring eyes almost letting me drown. Out of which, a picture of me walking in a foreign head. I can’t hear what you said. Then you say: Cold room, the second that life unwinds. A tinctured vase returns to grass. Secrets doled out deep inside a drum beat out of time. Whatever you said was ghostly slow like a second hand unwinding by match light. Lying back to the wheel, I shirked confusion. You already knew. Suitcases surround me. You picture me too far ahead. Yet I can’t hear what you’ve said. You say: Doldrums, some secondhand wine. Love, you knew my precincts. The stone house turned out black, the scenic tunics were deep inside. Who said home? Oh, I fall behind. That very secret height blinds. Lying like a diamond, the cock-thickening of you: hunchbacked arms, eyes left behind. You’ll picture me walking far, far ahead. I hear what you’ve done. You said: Go slow. I feebly bleed out. Matthew’s sermon turned out to be glass. I wander in windows soft as Sour Patch. No rewind. But something is out of touch and you, you’re Sinbad. That second date totally mine. Lying in a vacuum, the thickening plot thinks of you. The future’s not new. touchdown . Lights. All those celebrity behinds. A suitcase full of weeds. You picture me coming to. You: too close to me to hear what you’ve already said. Then you say: The second wind unwinds. Doves whistle, halving their dovely backs, watching out windows to see if I’m okay. See it, the dulcet moment? I’m like thicket tinkering for you. Fusion nothing you knew. Flash back to seagull-beguiled eyes. Sometimes talking to a barren lad. Such music so unbearably droll. The hand is mine. Random picture frames off the darkness. A Turing machine? Scotch-taping through windows, stolen from deep inside rum-beaded thyme. You say also: Behind sequins & hinds . . . And I’m in the barricade hearing the clock thickening you. Clematis enclosures, walking with news, pollinated by a secondary grief, while something reminds you of our love.

That we go back to life one day, the next, Some other century where we were alive, When music spelled itself out to us, often Incomplete, and nothing was more vague Than the banality of  whom to love and lose In line, the doppelgangers in rimless snow, Or even now, in summer, at day, by night, When something oblivious, replete, turns Back at us in idolatrous quiet, so we see Who in nullified particulars we really are At a desk of our own making, filling in for Someone else’s life sentence, blots drying On a silk tie having no meaning but today’s, When the loner puts his insomnia to rest.

How does one grow the cojones to celebrate a Fudgsicle? I’ll tell you, and won’t begin by mentioning trellises forsooth. The items on the register are mechanisms inscrutable, yes. But they sway in the doubled-up air with a sense of lucidity, A kind of gong affect that chiggers as it steamrolls forth, Appraisals for unchintziest bling. Time for a sea change. Your turn, and this means you Come with me. Agreeable and mute, like the original Doppelgänger, or as we in my neighborhood called it The Doppler Radar. On school mornings, a trust fund in my teeth, High yacht vanilla swilled my parents’ bed. I would be multiple and exact. From that vantage, a windpipe brought forth On invisible horseback to the sick child’s bed. I’m sure you can’t quite imagine it, ember In the tabby lobby. But I could. I arrested it. Gershwin and American Airlines and I could always Tell the voice without the face, God’s gift to me For being lame in phlegmatic tissue. O parabola. Look at the ashtrays! There they are. Swinging, roiling, Ocean-choppy, a gauntlet of remote controls, Paint supplies all stacked up with nowhere to go In the corner of a grave illness — like pink paint. This forecast of centenarians in Florida, and Burbank. All my life I wanted a fractal tie and strawberry apron. Now I’m a Church lady, no hint of arthritic condition. My name isn’t Sallie or Mae, it’s Sallie Mae. Millions of tiny pendants, Waterford crystal, bubbling From local tree-fort where boys grope one another. Will you come with me for Pilates at Fort Ticonderoga? Denise Austin is here. Stretch in the sun. Champagne woods, lakes chasms, dismounts. Then you say: You have no idea what I lived through. The Green Mountain Boys were like a second dad to me.

You were my gym buddy ferreting along spotty florescent ramps. Misbegotten signals blinked out bumpkin lanes over sable grass. We passed through many things. Peach sirens, entryway orderlies. Mangled disposition-stations. Chief in disbelief was concrete love. Firmer still, a melee awkwardness that showed all registrants just how we managed to pickpocket night. Then came dark crowds. Some doodled for the pad, debriefed what pumiced eyes meant in multi-dotted foreign rows. Buildings like a spider’s clothes. Later, we sped backward. A maw orchard, windless in the mind, boomed electronic lifts. I spied you at the prow of some sensation. I declined to call another name. Pelting noise flew off fairy citadels. Clocks, first thought abducted, were switched. Dialogues dispelled. My love heard a mug crash on the countertop of Long Island Sound. Our people became as ones lost. Not many rebounded with pledge, not many fetched familiars, stretched legs, reread white meetings. O stream, ring your ears. Handsome tubers, go ahead and wig out. Modern territories click like a mouse. Body becomes human body. On a skinny avenue I hushed up pyramidal steps older than sorcery. You know how I want to share a dust ball with misty partner. Dance one fabled evening and hear the skylark do something. Picnics bended over, they happen below. Swings parks rung. I inject chlorine into my memory-parts with lady satisfaction. Are you gay? A political campaign sanctioned a quart of moose. So stars soon quarreled back to the travel section of the North. I ignored that and opened my lips for a job to crunch and push at me, seeing the flat spacey wherewithal of disconnected items. I want a second act. What can I say but this was my second act. Must wrangle a look-see. The sign revenging its timely laziness in the ruffled strut of an accusing pillow. I hibernate in phrase as perfect as the mood of the blue lotus flower. Public aspects. The last shipment of vhs tapes left its factory on this day in 2008 or 2009. Meanwhile, delis around town don’t go like they used to. Who cares if I can’t hose you down my you, my Newfoundland. And George Washington, someone we can’t really know, rows over famed waters, wondering what his face will be, not in the future, not for the monthly book clubs. But as sovereign: as beast with dunce cap. I will dress you down in fresh lettuce and gobble your ear off with smutty keys principled as music. The marching saints won’t bother in battalion to much know. We make of him so much hackneyed affection, dress wounds as if equivocal all need. Hunger passes through to the other side. Entertaining pals you wouldn’t call but couldn’t not think to. A disfigured face’s humiliated psychic debris sprawls on gussy rug. It talks you into needing solace while cup passes from sleep to sleep. The positional plot warps but is the same. The deluxe mattress drifts on gravitational subtleties like the rest of us, practicing the gut’s banjo. No, in fact, I don’t know how he ever crossed the channels or canals from that stout city. I don’t really know if I ever really need to know. One thing we share is worshipping the image of a person we never knew.