wake up watching a film to find myself
in the lead role. My eyes adjust from dark
to day, outside in the dim light on the street
where everyone is saying the same thing
differently. Between folds of paper and body sweat

and smoke from rubber or cigarettes, billboards
with all the ads defaced, hurried footsteps,
the glaze of morning, it occurs to me:
The whole world is a vast film set
in which props are continually shifting,
four extras reprising the roles of twenty-four characters

and people you've never seen before
playing your most beloved ones. Things no longer
run on lithium, only time. The roving camera
is a mirror where the lens's gaze belongs
to the audience, or else a recurring memory,
propped on stilts and a rotating series of images

displayed from an old Bell & Howell Cassette Projector
in which stutters may result in earthquakes. Narration dissolves
into a guided tour with no boundaries and hardly any pauses
for pictures or carefully planned detours, feelings
and ideas burst to the foreground with all the fanfare
of a very impressive PowerPoint presentation:

A word, a laugh, a look, some slight distress,
a passing thought or fear forgotten since childhood
like the ghosts that endure in homes, the dust
clinging to furniture throughout generations,
the memories that live on as ghosts,
the people and places you used to know, whispers or misheard

words, winding staircases that spiral
into an M.C. Escher painting, seemingly contained
but rather limitless. No end or absence
of surveillance in which someone, somewhere
is changing the frames, retaining an illusion
of motion for a single, vertiginous moment.