of ghosts seen and ghosts
remembered only

the latter persist
so said having never seen

one but recalling
the proximity of vapor

one ghost spied by a neighbor
in my own window

unseen by me anyway
catalyzes recall

two children who
remain in my mind

murdered
quite spatially near

in an exchange
of words

en passant
though one removed

from another across the distances
of my own childhood

so marked one name
forgotten

another
not

that chill a breeze
I continue

to feel as a movement
become thus a question

of living as oddly
reckless
 

testing into a consumer society
as if that constitutes

a fit success
of what makes an

apparatchik in part
bound solipsist

say social mechanism and
the use of the word reading

shall I call certain parts
being guided by others

not the words by which I am distracted
so much for the book very well

and then regurgitating
one which is fancy
 

that JB waits within an interim
that point at which our paths

intersect telling
the way which leads

to one action
throwing a replacement

party in accordance
with certain accepted

rules instead of an obedient
copy and wonder at

how one might ride
that
 

heat at a premium
the force of living

persists in contradiction
of hopelessness

we lower
our needs and opt

for clothing in
layers partial

coverage as only
rain freezing

sheet ice and steps
in a series of words since

the idea of hope
as oblivion

provisionally reflects
an imaginary obliviousness
 

the world and I care
little

for one another
such abstract concerns and I

meet a man without hope
who asks me the time

he waits anyway
for the bus I pull a clock

from my pocket and
it’s time as a matter of digits which I suppose once

matched the sun’s passing
how now might a series of words

regress over time
is this then a risk

who would halve it and how quarter
here among all those

who are homeless
but we need an hour and this isn’t

anyplace special
though special since in its notable

lack
JB he be unborn again

and rejecting the bible
as only a book

he read three times and then with this witness
rejects it
 

I like a harangue
one bluster plus

another or not
an I in season of weather forewarned

dash roundabout willy
my hand as an aftermath

and needling nilly but
a portrait of place

in time as occupied
by a serial human abberance

it’s an attachment pulled
this way pulled that

by the dog we stop
to speak on a second

pass in abstraction
a study in character libel

unknown one to
another JB at the bus stop

one day as unusually warm that
as he says it hisses it’s

the end of the world
nearly sounding

the world ending signaled as oddly
an air leak
 

if the rule succeeds
meaning follows

a procedure a
a question occurs

questions always occur
as an examination

of being so
that it’s appropriate

to ask as
an urge to intervene