Skandha

You nurse the origami of your theory
that we are all the same person,
born from stencils but with different scars,

creases in the palimpsests of water.
Then you read how electrons
with their absentee ballet,

their sour habit of disappearing
like teens out bedroom windows
then slipping back in well after curfew

point to the existence of other realities,
hiccups in one’s love for sushi
or willingness to wear small animals.

Elsewhere, another kind of me
drinks puréed fiber and votes Republican
while a yesteryou folds lingerie

with plastic chopsticks in your hair.
I imagine time as a school bus
painted the wrong color,

that you are the one with a box turtle
asleep in a nest of newspaper, that I am still
haggling over football cards

with other farm boys in love
with their own biceps, fists a kind of mudra,
shame a kind of loam in our blood.

Copyright © 2009 Michael Meyerhofer All rights reserved
from The National Poetry Review
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission