READY

Ready

Where would rivers

Not be flowing

If water chose

Another way to learn

The truth that never

Comes back again?

If currents broke free

Who would remain

To show how some

Directions

Are so secret

They don’t even

Lead nowhere?

Who would teach

Us the rhythms

That are so quiet

Even silence has

Never heard them?

And how would

We reach destinations

Even the longest

Journey has never

Returned from trying

To find?

Often we bend

Like fluid around

The wrong wreckage

Of lives that have

Not truly foundered

But merely made for

Shore to search for help

In case the waterfall

Roaring up ahead

Will not carry us where

Water takes whatever it saves

From drowning.

A Room in Zürich

No going to
or coming from.
Just here. Me. Alone.

I listen for sound
but all is silent as
a ghost mouth
full of darkness.

Quiet I stay
hour after hour listening
to myself listen
like a blind man does
for the voice of truth—
when something explodes.

A telephone ringing off the hook.
Panicked shouting outside my door.
Glass breaking. Screams.

Cornered by moonlight
I stay crouched down.
Still. Listening as the shouting
tears down the hall.
Down the stairs.
Slamming behind.

With me, well, you live with walls
long enough, you begin to think

like a room.

That’s Showbiz

I’m dreaming of a white

Christmas on the road to

A desert golf course

Riding some would-be camel

With a pharaoh-like partner

Behind me crooning

That his love is buried deep

In a false woman’s heart

When

Bing!

Up ahead there’s a mirage

An oasis flickering and

Shimmering

And Charlton Heston with

His hair parted down the middle

Like the Red Sea

Is dancing kind of funny

With a cute Cleopatra

Who could pass for Elizabeth

Taylor anywhere

The music is ancient

The hieroglyphics are real

A thirsty extra in plus-fours

Pipe between his teeth

Sidles up to our caravan and

requests permission to play through

Cut!

Yells the director

So I return to wardrobe

Feeling a strange and confusing

Excitement that somehow

I lived a long time ago

In a kingdom history has

All but forgotten

Where the high priests of comedy

Performed nightly for crowds

Of wildly appreciative pyramid- builders

PAUL ILLIDGE lives and writes in a small city north of Toronto, Canada. His fiction, poetry and nonfiction have been published in The Antigonish Review, The Fiddlehead, Grain, Open Minds Quarterly, New English Review, Toronto Life Magazine, Mental Health Talk, Dumbo Press, Exile (upcoming), Sybil Journal, Adelaide Literary Magazine.