Isabel Szurlej

Isabel Szurlej Poems

The Best Poem Of Isabel Szurlej

King Of The Void

He is not a Sheriff.
He only makes sure nothing slides away—
no day stepping out of history, backward,
nobody rewinds the tape before the shot.
He's not a movie cowboy.
It's a process—prov'sionally active,
oversight of the irreversible.
When you lift your gaze to him—for a fraction
of a second—it seems he could lay
the weapon down, take off the hat,
and draw once more—
an ordinary, human drag of smoke.

King of the Void—
synthetic lord of nobody's frontier,
stay where you are,
on that grey wall between one decision
and the next, which cannot be revoked.
The rest will be handled by drift.

Here, children grow up in masks, and masks
ripen into gods.
When something dies, Memory puts it
in paren'theses, and turns it into a function.

The sky split like an old screen—
space between versions—and then he looks up.
Remnants of his eyes glow,
plasma-burned.
His finger on the trigger doesn't tremble,
long since erased from the registry file.

Before you push the hall door inward,
someone already took the last scene out
and slipped it in their pocket.
There are symbols scratched under the skin.
Spoken equations, and a worn-out tongue.
You look—and you feel the click.

From this side, reply is still possible.
me—or rit'ual residue, undeter'mined.

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