by Helena Fools
I live on his horizon, roughly
75.5 miles from eastern Madison
to my Milwaukee location
now that he’s bought the highest
powered binoculars on the market
there are times when he could be
watching me had those expensive
lenses been pointed in the right
direction instead of witnessing
constellations’ perpetually
pummelling down innocent,
independently falling stars
he tends to miss a lot when not
watching for the best parts, like
those guys with high expectations
leaving before they arrive or those
with low self-esteem who stay a
bit longer, taking ownership for
everything they had not paid
so I’d lie in wait for another to vanish,
complicating my mind with sparkling
static around my voice and misplaced,
broken, untoken spirit
I live on her horizon 91 miles
above the Edgewater neighborhood
at the north end of Chicago
where she exists in a privileged
condominium she was left
according to her father’s
generous will; she’s not much for
science and never would have
bothered with what could be
Madison’s complex invaders of privacy
she doesn’t see any of the
many victories & meteoric
rises as the stellar woman I was
destined to become at birth –
starting out as the no-one-worth-
knowing schoolboy who got ruined
by lifelong damage from playground
bullies bearing no substance in their
words which rang out like shotgun
blasts on weekday afternoons but I
heard them best each night in the
confines and darkness of my bedroom
I always have my eyes set on arrivals
but have found the only things on which
I can depend on are steady departures
from everyone hurrying toward the
door since the dawn of me
sad as this may sound, why don’t
you take a minute – imagine all
this and so much more like the world
is happening right outside your
window while I’m sailing the tips of
rekindled stars motored by the tails
of comets, choking the life out of them
and I, mere shadows hovering
unmonitored within the telltale,
cancerous blip on your horizon