Louis Kasatkin

Do maps redraw themselves after they are

rolled up and put back in the drawer?
...

We sleep the sleep of forever

sleep the sleep of here and now,
...

Days are made charitable by their absence,
best off intruding someone else's eviscerated
existence rather than mine;
Time was when I felt
...

Tendril lines snaking

coiled uncoiled uncoiling,
...

' We are both thieves
you and I ',
said the Man
who stole a Billion
...

Every evening at 5.09
he leaves the office,
takes the streetcar
into town,
...

a barely muted buzzing of flies
thousands upon thousands,
a counterpoint click-clicking
of crickets in chorus,
...

The hours of Autumn chime
their slow lament,
dedicated to lachrymose entwined
self-pity and ennui;
...

The mordant day drifts along its course
into the deep deep of evening,
its hours exhausted by a futility
arduously wrought with effort, endeavour, exasperation;
...

We all recall something else
somewhere else, someone else
other than the Here, the Now
and least of all ourselves
...

When we shut the books,

do the chapters rearrange themselves?
...

When Summer returns,

the last of the bones
...

In the beginning

when all has ended,
...

What do the numbers do when calculators are switched off?

And when they are switched back on again,
...

The Hours wait,
impatient
for the day
to start.
...

What the State says is lies
which those in office seek to disguise,

with myth, fiction, opinion or fable
...

' Quick! ',
' The camera! '
aim,
picture;
...

When that wind roars out of the South,
the one called the 'Zephyr',
it tears right through El Paso
with raw heat and anger;
...

A slow, slow morning

carapaced with expectation,
...

Maria Alvarez embroidered her
life with meticulous detail,
consistent in her affectations
she accumulated the outward
...