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Eric Stiefel: Phantasmagoric

March 4, 2022 by PBQ Leave a Comment

Each time I kill one of my old selves—or more often let him loose
into the static—I stumble on his shade sometime later, often
when the seasons have changed and the lilacs have withered
so that they, too, no longer resemble their former selves—
 
He was there, right there, standing in front of the meat market,
with a ring of brass keys in his hand, just watching 
as the pedestrians idled by—
 
and I start to ask if I would recognize myself if seen 
from any real distance, or would it all just blur, terribly,
so that there could be no gesture, no omen or ominous figure
lurking in the corner of one’s eye, and what
 
would I do then, what jar would I keep the days in, and how 
would I order them or else unravel further into a blizzard of ideas,
and then what sense could I make of this before suddenly drifting away? 

Filed Under: Issue 101, Poetry, Poetry 101 Tagged With: Eric Stiefel

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