Fred Aiken Writing

I’ve yet to attain any sort of luck,

but I’ll keep trying to write on walls until something sticks,

or I get swallowed by the wrong creature

lurking from a different dimension

as I burn through books and poems written about someone else

for reasons I couldn’t comprehend

a wondrous, beautiful, enticing, lovely grouping of modest noises

crackling through the sea as palindromes carry backward ideas

from one synapse to the next on the suspicion that thoughts are on the go

and static in the blink of several eyes contemplating the same thought

all throughout and within, now let’s begin…

I spotted you somewhere else

far off in the future when you were a lot better person

and blindly we lead each other with one foot

in front of the other

making each other nervous laugh

because I don’t know where you’re going

you don’t know where I’ve been

except for the mimicry we practice

while playing roles behind locked doors

in dimmed lights

foolish music playing on vinyl

as we picture what it might mean to have a child

practicing for a game that has no rules or roles

but it makes sense so long as we don’t move