Thinking of the constellation charioteer and looking at it.
And thinking of how J could come to a party alone because
my fantasy is that she’s unattached and a possibility.
I’m the imagineer of my world after all.
She has her world and I have mine, and
mine becomes what it is in my head.
And before that I thought of poetry as a job for early waking.
A crow’s call, a whistle blows, and a worker sets alphabets into strange orders.
And a thought about Bukowski saying “don’t try” and surely the poems
come to one who knows and fiddles with words.
Earlier, bunnies tripped motion lights at the other end of the cul-de-sac.
The bell buoy rang in the distance.
And out of the green tree tops shaped by light of a spaceship lamp light
came a pair of flopping wings, twisting and guiding a small torso toward me on the balcony.
Earlier the street sweeper blasted orange and red reflections of its lights across chimneys out front.
And back then I’d thought of how the stars are just background and perhaps the sleeping NPCs are too.
And that torso twisted toward my eyes.
It floated upward to my right, and the wings landed it onto the corner
roofline of the neighbor’s house right next to mine.
I craned my neck and shoulders around so I wouldn’t scare it with a full readjustment
of my body, legs and middle.
I held my twisted chin toward it.
Looking right into its black eyes.
10-12 yards from my face, it just stared into me.
Round, light beige, perhaps gray, face.
No ear feathers like the horned ones.
Dark body.
About one and a half feet tall.
He stared into me and I into him for 30 seconds.
When I tried to twist a little further toward him,
the chair creaked, and he jumped into the air and out toward the back yard
and the street freshly swept by the city vehicle.
He was right in front of the big dipper.
Fill it up until you’re done – that one.
That was his spot on the corner roof.
The dog missed him.
