They say
every PT Cruiser’s
haunted by the ghost
of a car designer
who didn’t get credit for it
and died alone and drunk,
mangled in the wreckage of a Sebring.

They say
if you stare into the neck
of a bottle of Coke long enough,
you’ll see the spirits of glass makers
driven from their jobs by the advent of plastic
(they’re in the bubbles, silly).

They say if you spin a quarter
and can say the name “Alexander Hamilton”
ten times before it stops and falls,
the federal deficit will right itself.

It’s been said that the wind
off the east end of Long Island
carries the voices of waitstaff
who died longing to be swept off their feet
by Papa Legba or the shade
of Jay Gatsby’s doppelganger.

Electronic drums bear the weight of stars
who died in gas stations,
who failed to make hits, who cried foul
in trashed dressing rooms full of roaches.

They say things about you
and your family too:  how you were
the offspring of fabulous wealth
and were deposited with those cretins
after a coup in your home country.
If you sleep long enough
in the shadow of the flag,
you’ll be lost to your fortune forever

and left with only a vague longing
to read the signs of your squandered past
and discern the truth from little things:
the sneakers on phone lines, the symbols
on a shampoo bottle, the lyrics
of a hideous pop hit. 

They say the world’s a scary place
and every interaction’s got a whiff
of the Hoax of Hoaxes in it. 
They say a lot of things,
and all of them don’t need to be true
to fill you with a lust
for conspiracy.

Maze in the center.
No entrance visible
but the journey requires me
to seek it,
so I seek it.

I am circling,
looking for the gate,
listening for a creak,
feeling for chinks and seams.

Push hard, whisper
old spells, light fires,
burn herbs; nothing
is revealed.

Turn and look behind me
and there is the open gate
that has been outside of me
this whole time.

I walk through and there I am
now, inside the center, having no clue
as to the physics or geometry
involved.  But there is the first turn,
and I move deep into the labyrinth,
turn upon turn. 

A book on the ground
now: I turn to a passage:

“There is a road that is not
visible.  You walk it here on earth
not knowing all the dimensions
you pass through, and once at the end,
you will not have a way back.”

How familiar it is, this puzzle
now, the walls that hold my old photographs
and scribblings, my struggle
laid out before I arrived this time. 

At the center of the maze,
a stone.  A mouth in the stone
and a rose in the mouth in the stone.
A hawk above that will not light,
a wind blowing up out of the earth.

I have been inside and outside myself
and found past embedded in present and future,
and how will I get back now
that there is no difference?

I greet you
in the doorway
of the plain house
of your ancestors,

where you are standing
even though you’re not
yet born:  you pass through
the door and do not look back,

walk the yard ignoring the feel
of grass below your bare and tender feet,
you will not remember this later, you will be
surprised by it, the folding of it underfoot,

the soft staining of your heels and soles,
you will forget it and the house so warm
and comfortable, sparely furnished with only
necessities, you will clutter your own homes

with toys and gadgets and huge furniture, beds
the size of entire rooms, closets larger than the kitchen
and its smells, its deep banquets and crowded feasts,
you will forget this pyramid of family crowned with living

as well as possible in a hard world, you will forget it all
until a day comes when you seek out the source of the longing
you suddenly feel as you look around at the clogged rooms
of your own monster homes, your interconnected empty relations

with those a thousand miles away with whom you share
only one common interest, you will recall this when you can’t stand
the rage you feel at the empty lawn out front, the gray cars, the roads
lined with similar homes as full of inchoate anger and sadness and

unfamiliar faces, the ones you pass in the morning and at night
and do not acknowledge; that day you will begin to claim
a true life of your own.  I greet you coming out into the forgetting
that is the world.   Welcome: I greet you knowing that you will not remember me ever,

for I am the forgettable man who knows what will happen to you,
to whom it has already happened and who will watch
as you flail through, living toward a thing called contentment, a thing
I wasn’t made for because someone has to stand aside from it, greet you,

turn away shaking my head and thinking hard about how I was never able
to forget a thing and thus rediscover it.  I greet you knowing
how separate we always will be from one another.  Welcome to a world
denied to me, such an enviable place, such a good place to lose and recapture, to be in exile from.