I don’t acknowledge him often,

pay scant attention when gliding

by the palm-polished knob

securing the basement door –

a door through which I’ll never pass.

Today, though, adrift in trivialities,

I spied him hunched down

on his wheeled throne, brassy eyes

pregnant with the casualties

of misfiring nerves.

Like a sideshow gawker simultaneously

repulsed and transfixed, I fought the urge

to mock him, instead mouthing words

of hope and forbearance … which rang

hollow as pompous political promises.

 

That night he appeared again

in a patchwork quilt of memory scraps,

first dancing along its border

like Bojangles, feet afire, then flitting

with the ease of a katydid across

embroidered squares of past expectations.

Let me come with you, I cry, to again

trip lightly in the fantastical world

of the mundane. But he dissolved

without replying, leaving me to stare

into a dusky chasm of discarded dreams.