I think therefore I am wrong because it’s me doing the thinking
Have you considered you might be wrong?
Your grandparents powerwashing the
patio
at this hour is only a
problem because
you think they died years ago
or they did
but this evening’s eternity-tuned
intent
wants to try on the bygone years
like
wearing all your clothes at once
to avoid
checking a bag or the
opposite: a Buddhist
nudist in a worn out dakini embracing
all the feminine energy and saline
masculinity
of being totally incorrect on
line at the airport
Even your grandparents were once
distracted
by the clacking departure board’s
fallacies
at the start of a long lost and
found weekend
People leave all the time but they take
their time with them and they also
take you
beyond the preemptive ache of a
wrecked idea
across the Stygian waters and the
Kraken’s lair
into the cozier notion of a permanent visitation
How are we for time?
I can think of seven reasons to get up early
but none of them are as good as the one
or two to stay up late Even the
venal corruption
of a summer night by the suns’s too
early
perp walk over the river is
something we
can sweet talk our way into a high
backed
booth of a diner to recover from
Can we
agree this poem is amazing at
swapping
the future hip replacement blow
by blows
with hipster basement freakout
shows
without riding a breezy denial of
elder
telemetry? Who even talks like that?
Who gets to places on time? My
Scarlet
Pimpernel-level grandparents
outfoxed
the clocks by setting them ahead
enough
for the only way to answer What
time is it?
is the internal present’s question
What do
you mean time? They did
what they could
to put off showing up late They
and their
temps perdu bon mots would
have us ignore
today’s literalist claim they’re no
longer here
when we can all agree they’re
not here yet
Does it ruin the poem to make it?
Is it crazy to think I’m god if I think
you are too and none of us wields
power
beyond evidence in our existence of
a
shared evening for which we were
created
to affirm? Obviously this is the best
approach to first dates and job
interviews
Just like every captain’s
announcement
is either welcome aboard or we’re going
to die and we can’t know which before
the speaker clicks on My grandparents
were fond of long bumpy flights
or at least
where they led inside a shaken
cocktail
lounge They are eavesdropping from
the edge of the space between me
writing this and you making the
voyage
through it A Pucci woodland of
pipe smoke
Florida water and certs from which they
gently rev the speculative
world with the
secular divine so be it and so
it is treatment
of a secret engine they red
eye into life
Lab Report
Time is the answer but not the right one The one right below
ugh this guy again as my least favorite solution to how
I believe in science but not
myself and the evidence knows
it
If you love me you have a funny way of letting me in on the
intimate infinite Furniture is what we curl under if we want
to be mistaken for a prophet when the earthquake or cops arrive
with all they need to prove your research into dust bunnies
was worth it I believe science is worth the time it takes
to transform utopian theories into people and then people
back into theories of history But I want it to be worth the time
that calls itself a spell the occasion beyond hours or eras
where we say so long enough to erase the reasons for
any farewell
and hello again means we’ve always been in transit
together
through the eternally pleasant mist of uncountable encounters
My wallet and phone are also haunted
My two roommates are the last place
I saw my keys and least
favorite ghost
hunters episode where the team is
hunting
for my keys or maybe love It’s gotten
very quiet as though a gravelly voice
whispered found it! from
the old basement
but the investigators left an hour
ago
and the spectacular countenance
you’re
permitted alone in the stricken house
freezes on your face in the
moment
when a poem is working and you
forget
the neighbors are also up
late with
their cancer cures or with getting
rich
and the night could just as easily
invite
you to set the table for dinner or
on fire
or to be the fork who runs off
with the spoon
into the Rodgers and Hammertime adaptation
of My Fair Ladle Had the Tine of Her Life
ethically non-monotonous in the
semiotics
of steamy erotics quadruple
entendred
like an old writer paid by the
inch I’m hardly
an expert at anything but over the shoulder
glances the coy sonnet method of getting
someone’s attention to wander far away
and maybe also take me with
them
I’m counting on you to wear down
I’m counting on you to wear down this jagged idea of the good
life There’s always a pebble in your shoe you’re too much
in a hurry to stop and yank out It’ll emerge unrecognizably
smooth on arrival I’m beginning to think every grain of sand
began as a massive castle Last week was another last of an era
that only ended when we noticed evolution was up to something
but not what beyond the menace implicit in hello Maybe
a new dirtier martini will help it out the door or us as we
drown like yet another sorrow at the filthy mouth of a river
I don’t recall diving into but here we are wedged between
our incipient ability to lose it all and a kind of gin and tonic
immobility of the constellations under which we falter
heroically and vanish before anyone else arrives to take
down our names as good enough examples of who not to be
.jpg)
Brendan Lorber is a writer, visual artist, and teacher. He is the author of If this is paradise why are we still driving? and several chapbooks, most recently Unfixed Elegy and Other Poems. His next chapbook, Motivational Omens is coming out this fall. He’s had work in The American Poetry Review, Brooklyn Rail, Fence, McSweeney’s, The Recluse, and elsewhere. With Joe Elliot, he hosts Overhear a cross-generational reading series in Brooklyn in which at least one reader must live within walking distance of the venue. His visual art is in The Museum of Modern Art, The Free Black Women’s Library, The Woodland Pattern Center, The Scottish Poetry Library, and in private collections. It has been featured on CNN, NBC’s The Today Show, and Oprah. He’s edited Lungfull! Magazine, The Poetry Project Newsletter, taught writing workshops, and curated both the Zinc Bar Reading Series and the Segue Foundation Reading Series. He teaches fantasy cartography, and lives in a little observatory in Brooklyn.