by Adam Scheffler

You are dead, Lewis Carroll, the young man said
And yet your hands are so strong
You are juggling two chairs, a saw, and your head
How do you get on?

In my life, chuckled sadly the poet
I shook when I tucked in a sheet
I screamed when I walked in a field of roses
And couldn’t make out my feet.

You are dead, said the boy, beg your pardon,
But you cure modern diseases
And you twist–tie stars to posts in your garden
Where they float and shine in the breezes.

Well in my life, the photographer said
From the crack in the tree there came voices
Which said one life’s as good as another
So don’t make any choices.

You are dead, said the boy Please excuse me
But you pop grapes into wines
And sleep high up in a spiral tree
Smiling and dressed to the nines.

You are right, the corpse said, I indulge
Far too much for my age
But when I grew up in the Battle of the Bulge
I played the Marseillaise on my cage.

You are so dead, said the baby, please tell me
How to live a real life
Should I work hard at learning to spell
Should I think of taking a wife?

Oh to be living, smiled the kind homme.
You’ll figure it out I guess.
Now leave me it’s time for my lesson in drums
And you make me a little depressed.

by Adam Scheffler

A man cobbles together his life together
as best he can, skimming
these shark–abandoned waves

but must so many pastimes lead
back to head–butting the walls of the
padded self ?

In the next version, you’ll play a videogame
where you’ll play yourself playing yourself

And I hate how touching, we stop feeling the other
person’s hand so soon, our bodies assuming
there’s nothing there unless it’s new

The way a man shoves another dorito into his craw

Or a priest rips another black note from his
reptilian brain and slips it into the church’s
suggestion box.

Once I too prayed to god, projected
my best self upwards and spread
it in the finest mirror–net over the nightsky,
looking back down on myself in bed.

Sometimes I still confuse women with goddesses,
or a dead sea–horse floating upside down
with the treble clef of my own happiness

But sometimes I better myself
by noticing things around me:

Look. Tonight’s ambulance spreads dancing jewels.

And across the park, circling the fountain,
two skateboarders have found rich
girlfriends and are balancing them in the air.

by Adam Scheffler

I have lots of hearts, it’s grisly.
I leave them bloody, soaking the pillow.
I keep them in a drawer where they turn gray.

It’s a bother having so many.
Some are stretched as waterskins, snakeskins.
Some glitter like precious stones and are cold.

But my hearts are non–biodegradable:
They are made of kevlar and teflon.
They glow in the dark, but don’t light my way.
They whisper bad advice to me like bridesmaids,

telling me to gift each one away.
‘Take this, it’s all of me,’ I lie, already a new heart
growing inside me like a dark pearl
or shadow of a disease on an ultrasound.

by Tom Saya

How is it
all those worlds out there
don’t collide, obliterating each other? or
given the great distances, how is it
without colliding, they get close
enough to feel an attraction, which,
then, influences the very skies
they witness, the very liquids

of their eyes? And how is it
this attraction, this gravity, as
old as anything, sometimes alters,
is no longer reliable (how?),
and the orbit one fell into
becomes a speeding into darkness?