Shifting

Questions, remember? Dusted
for prints of sincere attacks

call me how a cast of names
sullen against the usual backdrops

never stop a slip in starship colors
one has to die and die on.

Now’s no time to stall a tangle
among the melancholy horns

or refuse to darken a window.
Freedom is the solitude to pay for?

The day reflects another mouth
and substantial nightfall fabrications

mean anything to be out
of the life they’re talking past

and say you still owe them.
So you call up crying

that it would be good to have it back
when you see me dead on the six o-clock news.

This poem appears in the 2006 Anthology
View all poems by Mark Wallace