The Glitch

by Carl Watson

I’ve been gone for a while and no one can find me,
They’re not looking for errors in the text they inhabit,
But like an odd vowel sound in the monk’s chant,
Unnoticed, transcendence was diverted for a time;

I was a spare syllable in a stream of propaganda.
Whose meaning wasn’t altered b y my presence,
Because the war went on despite me;
And no minds were changed because of me;

And I was a film clip from the wrong movie slipped in
To the main feature in a crowded theater
That was overlooked for the sake of a story
That everyone thought they already knew;

I was a quick blip on the black radar screen of the sky
In the ongoing search for aliens,
But the searchers couldn’t know the alien was me,
Another anomaly that left no record;

It’s been said a conversation was paused once
Because two people thought they heard a third voice
Commenting without context, and so
They could never agree who was right or wrong;

And it’s been said a stage actor stopped once,
Just for a second, because an odd face in the audience
Caused her to recite the wrong lines, but she went on
With the play anyway, and no one cared;

And there were days when I ran with a roving pack
Of predators, until they discovered I had no teeth
And couldn’t eat the kill, but they let me survive
For a while anyway, if only as a joke among wolves;

I was a painted bird in an epic poem of the Hero’s Journey,
But got edited out by scholars as a mistake
Left over from an earlier version.
I’ve been a victim of such editing all my life;

But I want to say, though I am often lost,
I am always there in the Autumn,
When the wheatfields turn to gold, the wind blows,
And the crows take wing;

Occasionally, the odd explorer on her houseboat
Would spot my displayed feathers in the forest,
But those notebooks and drawings have been misplaced,
And it will be years before anyone comes looking again;

You see, I was here for such a short time and space
That the clock makers didn’t notice any discrepancy
And cartographers thought me a fancy
Of drunken sailor stories swapped ages ago;

But I was no non-entity, no,
Because I kept interrupting this or that flow,
Without even trying, like a temporary whirlpool
Formed by an obstacle in the stream of perception;

Or a pebble thrown at the window
Of the midnight composer, bent over his piano,
Interrupting the flow of his concentration,
Forestalling the masterpiece that could change the world;

A shadow in the hall disappears when the light burns out,
The residents change the bulb but the shadow doesn’t return,
Because maybe it was never there to begin. You see,
Mostly I’ve been a memory of what never happened;

Except for you, I happened for you.
You saw my fleeting figure against the backdrop of your life
And you tracked it down, adapted my dark spark
To a bright motif in the symphony that played between us;

And maybe no one will ever play that music again,
But it really did exist once,
Because we both heard it, even if no one else could,
And as I remember, it was something close to magic.