Joshua Keiter

Is it possible
we now forget about
the latest atrocities
before they happen

just as the last
two years appear
as a gap on
an incessant timeline

perhaps the only
evidence we have
of the unspoken
become unspeakable

the images not even
obscured by content 
warnings background
blurred by vision

unseeing what is unseen

The wake up ghost
spent all night searching
for the next dream
out of the shadows

to stay under heavy eyelids
mind recognizing shapes
occasional stories 
materializing from the ceiling

as if sleeplessness were
the prescription for existence
bearing down upon
the lightness of synapses

what if dreams were the way
whoever dreams us tries
to make sense of whatever
wakefulness appears to be

translating echo into image
like we do all day long
repeating the immediate past
attempts to find a moment

unmediated to ourselves
dreaming of silent sleep

Why does the past return
as if about to happen 
gusting through the trees
leaving budding branches
broken about to bloom
on the path to be brushed
aside like so much future
stilled by excess motion
frozen in its potential
since there is not enough
time to remember why
we live in forward even
waiting for the past

Today’s roadside sign
so modest as to be 
completely missable
WOKE IS A JOKE
and I have to agree
I’d rather be sleeping
waking hours are pretty 
ludicrous to be honest

Because nothing posted
on the internet ever goes away
I noticed some new comments
on YouTube videos I recorded
five years ago in the after and
before a lonely no longer kid
banging away on a guitar
in his bedroom like quarantine
songs that meant so much to him 
and still do he thinks maybe 
no one else does turns out they do
and sometimes they seek out
new versions because they want
to play them on guitar themselves
maybe they seek the chord changes
inadvertently they found everything
I was feeling at the time the encroaching
abyss at the edge of finding and losing
you not sure if you knew these songs
were for you I didn’t even write them
I just lived them for five minutes or so
and recorded them for whoever to find

The world is getting fuller 
of things to discuss 
with our child

we can’t even 
explain ourselves

To put things in perspective
today I learned that graupel exists 
a weather phenomenon of
frost-covered snowflakes

while a satellite observed
an ice shelf larger than NYC
breaking off eastern Antarctica 
an entirely worrisome event

always something to grapple with

The infinity of the camera
roll brings your face to life
or at least light so many
moments on the same day
which had been this day
some years in the past now
no matter for a flicker 
your face is alive see how
your eyes caught the same 
light without which you
would not have life where 
does light go without it 
we would not exist at all
ephemeral as a photograph 
fleeting to life as it flows past
the river of time a trickle
light glinting off the surface of all