Free Come on All You Ghosts by Matthew Zapruder Page A

chargers. Each of the various
    faiths of our various fathers keeps us only partly protected. I don’t
    want to talk on the phone to an angel. At night before I go to sleep
    I am already dreaming. Of coffee, of ancient generals, of the faces
    of statues each of which has the eternal expression of one of my feelings.
    I examine my feelings without feeling anything. I ride my blue bike
    on the edge of the desert. I am president of this glass of water.

Little Voice

    I woke this morning to the sound of a little voice
    saying this life, it was good while it lasted, but I just
    can’t take it any longer. I’m going to stop shaving
    my teeth and chew my face. I’m going to finish inventing
    that way to turn my blood into thread and knit
    a sweater the shape of a giant machete and chop
    my head right off. The leaves had a green
    aspect, all their faces turned down towards the earth.
    This is exactly how I wanted to act, but I didn’t
    know where the little voice had hidden, and anyway
    who talks like that? What a loss, another tiny
    brilliant mind switched off by that same big boring finger.
    Clearly life is a drag, by which I mean a net that keeps
    pulling the most unsavory and useful boots we
    either put on lamenting, or eat with the hooks of some
    big idea gripping the sides of our mouths and yanking them
    upward in a conceptual grimace. Said the little voice,
    that is. I was just half listening, one quarter wondering
    what the little park the window looked onto was named,
    and one quarter thanking the war I knew was somewhere
    busy returning all those limbs to their phantoms.

Never Before

    My neighbors, my remnants, in what have you chosen
    to bury your heads? Shadow, said one mote
    in an auditorium after a lecture. Some
    archive explorer had just finished discussing
    a group of islands. Inside me for a while
    a tribe had theorized purely and wrongly
    its location merely on the basis of tides. I was
    feeling extinct, and wishing for a sudden
    totally silent sliding out from the wall of twenty
    or so very excellent beds so we the audience
    could together engage in further collective
    dreaming. I would describe that lecturer’s voice
    as twilight shadow smeared origami cloudlet
    but the historical ceiling gilded by the names
    of agreed-upon great thinkers is a beautiful dowager
    making her sleepy wishes into dimness
    soon to retire gracefully known. I hear soft
    seventies cell phone songs. Come home
    those who love a librarian aspect. I am one,
    for give her time and she will answer any question
    no matter how spiral, no matter how glass,
    so slow to judgment you can sit among her
    like a reading room and read and think
    until the docents come, they move as trained,
    as trained they place a careful hand on our shoulder.
    The door locks automatically but not before
    wind slips in to do its research on blackness
    which gets even blacker, on the fabulous black
    dust intercom orchard of what happens
    when people fall asleep in their dreams and dream
    what they are. Have I mentioned lately
    I have been reading a book about a steam powered
    carriage we are actually in moving slowly
    through the countryside towards the kingdom
    and its ruined citizens? Have I mentioned tonight
    we shall both stand before the enormous spiral
    of wrecking balls in a dress made of laughing glass?

Yellowtail

    The wind made a little movement
    as if it were trying to reassemble.
    I looked up from my affidavit. Sometimes
    my life feels taped, and quiet evenings
    I listen back. I hear the humming of the car
    and through the windshield see the road
    twisting down a series of cliffs to a very small
    blue ocean that like the placid eye
    of a beast that regarded our lives without
    any desire to eat them grew larger
    and stared a little past us, absently
    flecked with gold. I would like now to believe
    I felt like a leaf. Each night I told
    my brother and sister ever more fabulous
    stories about far away humanoid beings
    with ordinary loves