Rereading Myself
I’m rereading We are
Billion-Year-Old Carbon.
I wrote it when
I was a face card.
The words seem foreign
to me, literally,
as if I showed up for
a hearing test and
I had to conjugate Latin.
The deeper I dive down
into the paisley prose
I felt so enamored of
once upon a time
the more I start to change.
I am not the man
with the arthritic
pogo stick. I am growing
a horn like a unicorn,
like a taxi driver. Oh you
years to come,
stay out of my way.
I am careening down the
corridors of time. All my
teachers are jumping out
of the way, out of the world.
All my readers, all my last loves.
Dizzy
Dizzy simply picking up
a pile of books.
My daughter takes the
stack, orders me to
a chair. The doctors don’t
know why I’m dizzy.
It’s in the hands of the gods.
I may fall out of
the world. I may land
faceup, the sky a cyclotron.
I may land outside this poem.
Corey Mesler has been published in numerous anthologies and journals including Poetry, Gargoyle, Lunch Ticket, Five Points, Good Poems American Places, and New Stories from the South. He has published over 50 books of fiction and poetry. With his wife, he owns Burke’s Book Store (est. 1875) in Memphis.