Scrabble

They’re playing it like a numbers game
Or chess: one move and two hundred responses
Air-conditioned, with no room to breathe
The rush of tension, brief suspension,
Think for moment – the spurred plans
Never made will live like burning forests
Fenced in concrete and glass.

We language in the fall out of put-downs,
Musical from the ground up to a pointed lie
Of a land heavy, unsaid with creation
and tectonic rulings, perpetual quakes
In the perceptual shaken head: imagine
Potential unbound, spinning cloud-ward
And following the directionless storm through empty space.

I’m going to force the game, hands where I can see them.
We will shake. We will laugh. We will say
The things we’ve all heard before and we,
We will not think, we will not judge, and we,
We will pretend we’ve never heard it before.