Tom Taylor

PICKLES

If erected
I will not surf

This nagging ache of head and sled
I’m staking my life on it, I swear to you,
Not to relinquish any nerve or stutter
And yet sail these seas magnificent

A Chinese sailor in retreat, I’ll smooth
The lineage against these newer strokes --
The healing tone of quiescent politicos
Blathering their spumoni across the plain

It held across centuries, then enfolded
Enfiladed into interior scorn or piety
Into the moon’s nooner smiling again
As she comes across, waits in the awning

This is the showdown at the porticoes,
The loomer destinato in its several parts
Dropping clothing overside into the matching
Stride and plenty, your futile gestures glowing

At star and plenty, you’ve cleaned the hours of
Their particular destiny in reverse, memory made
Into looser schemes and encounters from the
Other side of life, from the synchronous present

How me, some other stranger set or sentenced
Like the manner of your movie overboard and
Seen again and yet again the same ads intervening
For the staid conclusion you’ve seen over and over

“A series of conscious moments between bowls”
we said earlier over the topic what to do before
it’s tomorrow again… and again…. How’s the air
above your own reckoning, lessen inconcise more