On the Sidewalk

Replicants, revenants, doppelgangers, and the repetition of history, birth and death, ceremony, ritual, honor, tradition, gunfire, bugle call--

Look at the way the light falls in photographs, as if these unknown and unknowable people are blessed, caressed, confessed divine or favored by forgotten gods, heroes, torch-bearers, crowned by the tribe, the culture--

While with these words anyone and no one may be joined, linked, connected through magic beyond warriors, farmers, women, offspring, into settings of clerks, scribes, those who have the king's tongue and ear and are uplifted and buried in the embrace of civilization.

We call on those things to which we are attached-- coins, radios, salt, voices, scandals, dangers, pleasures, sea changes of consciousness in bottles bearing messages over tides, waves generated by brain or mind or transmission towers--

Upon these we stake our reality (do we not?) and create all those impossibilities that never existed.