on days of convergence, the dust
draws out the cellars and the attics
from the boxes that comprise all houses,
and i remember with shock that i have lived,
finding myself in trinkets and resenting
the life dissolved in their unfeeling,
winning my footsteps in a raffle. 

they are the worst days, yet
the worse is to father words 
for these overpopulated planets,
rupturing rotation
when the dread of the past 
demarrows the bones and the naked heart 
murmurs in goosebumps:

reborn by an inalienable law of procession 
that bars my contemporaneous visions,
the blind hands pilfer and pour out
the boxes onto the vacuumed carpet,
filling the unseen stains
with the boy's painted happy-new-years
and birthday wishes for newer siblings.

i know that in the next box,
in all the next boxes,
lives the present from my only classmates,
a girly head, stitched up 
from pink handkerchiefs of red-square eyes,
but i am glad she has no body -
at last, the untelevised!

12.13.98