Three Poems – Daniel Shapiro

 
 
Maybe You Know Where You Are

They lied to you about the destruction, about the blink of day to night. We played to an audience of static, not smoke. The men in white suits never came for us. We wore the white, the permanent surrender, took shelter in the peacock of stained-glass window. We lacked the oxygen to catch fire, choked through calisthenics while someone else’s match exhaled. Our bodies snapped into position, the last semblance of upright.

We hope you never find out what it’s like to have your face placed on another face, to feel another voice when you sing. A fire’s shadow doesn’t burn. The reflection of a band plays only one dimension per ear. These are the words of a man whose head can’t find its body. There’s no we anymore, band scattered like a rifled pigeon. What’s left of me speeds along the highway swallowing white stripes, blurring the spaces where they force you to stay.

Title is a lyric from “Burning Down the House” by Talking Heads (#9 on Billboard Hot 100, 1983).