15 (Easter Egg Hunt)

Time is a mad wheel, circling itself,
and I am a twisting Trail, Smoke wafting down
the myriad paths of me
I am the monster in my own fucking closet,
I know this, have been, will be,
forever possibly,
or until I become a crumbling brick in the
bloody red road that now leads, surely, to
Carpenter’s Farm

There’s a sun that rises in the west
and sets again each evening in the west
If you walk into it, someone else rises
from the ashes of your flesh and bones,
your chattering teeth rattling around in
in a head full of foreign ideas

the Death Card is the one you draw when
everything ends and begins simultaneously,
the spark ignited, extinguished, glass filled
and drained, the box emptied, occupied,
the birds flown and settled to roost,
a murder and a creation under scrutiny,
inspection

It’s the point you realize that the only things concrete are
up and down.

The worst part about finding yourself is reaching the end.*

*Josh Malerman — Carpenter’s Farm

[For Josh Malerman, of course]

Poem by Shane Douglas Keene

READ THE SERIAL NOVEL BY JOSH MALERMAN