The Skin of Epimenides
Read The Seven Sages and you’re asked to believe this loner cured all Athens of disease,
backwards prophet who saw past not future, first things first, like the irruption of order
into cosmos. But a seer doesn’t want for time and is free to pen nothing in yours or my lifetime.
There was an ageless stint in a cave, fifty-seven years until, out of sync with prevailing fashion,
he flashed scars like the aftermath of disease, a real enough itch he was unable to relieve
by pinching (from an ox-hoof) a greyish powder of diminishing bliss, of sustaining disorder.
The scars were harmless, tattoos in foreign fashion, self-inflicted glyphs numbering fifty-seven.
Sparta, none-the-wiser, flayed him for the future to fathom like a drum skin, test to a powder.
Il Padre
After Fellini’s 8½
Marcello calls after his reappeared father.
He wants him to pause and extend this chance
to add to what he knows of his father, to what his father knows of him.
His father is dapper and no older. Their ages are closer.
The dead man is a gift, the flash of a mirror
into a deadened commute. We hardly talked.
When Marcello straightens again, he is no man’s son.
The Club
Time is what things take and a short set of mirrored stairs is enough to boundary this world and another.
The club smells of cola, sweet, and the shoeless dancer dances to her own reflection, slower in the glass by a telltale fraction.