The Architect by Joshua Katcher          clay, oxide, glaze

To The Architect

Something is unraveling. I hear metal being cut or shaved. Sparks.
Screw-heads sit stripped like busted locks. Every clock is a countdown to death.
I feel the rocks shrinking my breath.
In a dream I flew through a blue corridor, past doorways and through people bursting into thick lightdust.
Thick like pollen, like ragweed, like the sucrose of springtime – like the cavities of summer.
The roots of oaks ride canals as boats, in Panama or in Venice.

Somewhere in America thunderheads are poised like flexed biceps,
squeezing sweat onto assembly-line houses.
The lightening bulges like veins over the graveyards of once-mythic landscapes.

Will there be a grand finale? A climax, a burst, an apex?
Will it fizzle-out or just droop?
I’m not running around with rattlesnakes raised above my head in fistfuls.
Something is unraveling. The signs are like droppings.
The dreams are like droppings.
Sick.
A key with no lock, a foot with no sock, a barn with no cock, a boat with no dock, a ring with no rock.
A shock.

- Joshua Katcher