‘This Is It’ by James C. Frank

    

    

3 planets align: where? you

don’t know yet. Just point

at what you might think

is Venus. Go

on, you were curious already

and he is more in tune with

you than you will believe.

A suburban sky, cloudless,

is pretty much as perfect

for this than one could hope for.

Do it. Prophesy

is too dumb a word, but let me

tell ya “this is it.”  Yeah: you

are doing it. Here,

taste my sunspot: this star

shot its last load of light

a billion years ago in both

of your eyes at this same time

and he is that many more

light years full of what you

half-believe. 

There is no denying it. 

I am the cosmos speaking.

(2005)

‘At One Point, I Even Manned the Grill’ by James C. Frank

     

    

Either the fireworks were worse

or the trees grew. There’s no

two ways about it. I was

standing in the same exact place:

351 paces from the asbestos-ridden

headquarters of the extinct

Bethlehem Steel Corp. So

sunburned and peeling, skin

under my cotton t-shirt assumed

the fiber had travelled back in time

through a wormhole and regained its

field-like coarseness and seeds.

Ouch. And this after a family

picnic where nobody ever asks

you anything. I waded in

the pool as an apparition of the distorted

propaganda they ginned up

against me during the decade I spent

out West trying to get famous.

I went to the fireworks after

the picnic with my family

alone because they give my

honey panic attacks. They did

not ask why she was not there.

But if they had, would I have

given them the real or the

fake answer? That I won’t know

because they don’t believe in ghosts.

(2010)