YOU ARE INVISIBLE

and everything is tucked in twice.
It is night-time at the Waffle House.
It is night-time and the Food Lion parking lot
is mysteriously full. All our durable goods
roll like marbles down truckers’ corridors:
flashes of neon, void intervals, a clock
that doesn’t keep time but loses it instead.
Memory vanishes like an inside-out room
shaken over a trashcan: the naked space
beneath the bed, the decorative throw pillows,
paste brooches and pockmarked shoes.
You are a city of resin, of negative space,
of chalk. I am the rupture between past
and future, a TV antenna with cross-hatched
arms outstretched. I write your name
in new cursive on the condensed glass
of bus window, erase it with a trace of breath.
The floor here is littered with black gum,
with chicken bones and flattened wrappers.
I am hurtling through transparent space
beyond which there is no other.
All over town is not that far from here.
I can tell you where to find it.
You can’t go into the dark alone.

first appeared in 32 Poems, spring 2009