Will Cordeiro On Tilt

We may figure something out
or the figures may will us into something.

Wind softly yammers through untoothbrush’d-yellow
leaves, evasively, like late Ashbery.

To guess the rules was one way to part-
icipate; was, particularly, one way to rue.

Game-theory ain’t what it used to be—
ay, there’s the rub, the kissing booth closed down.

Reflecting on the ash that will consume us,
she said it was all just smoke and mirrors.

Experience that mocks our expectations,
like a snow-day’s failure to occur. Each

aspires to the absolute, no detail
final of what is fungible: this inrushed a

exacts to clench what ‘is’ wants ‘is’ to be
then scutters elseways, loosened from itself.

Is anxiety just an allusion nowadays? Four
out of five ogres agree I am the monster

that these words had wished to demonstrate. Plotzed
from reading yet another epistolary novel, Howard

decided to embed the day into his dreams; not the book
but his own cleverness had kept him long awake—

glops of notch, eyelash curlers, hot flashes
from male menopause, then after the power

outage, the microwave blinked midnight
for a week. So much bloody transigence

as one cannot not yield to things as bright
and sudden as a sneeze. Whereupon, a spandrel skirrs,

having put the "maze" in paronomasia.
With winter’s breath the lovers vapor kissed.

The sky was a leaking breast implant;
a residue of salt-rings caked their jeans.

You play mumbledy peg behind my back;
I’ll go on practicing my celesta.