These latter days I’d rather hide my face
with eavesdroppers and scopophiliacs
who’ve taken shelter in this musty place.

Boy, just lookee at that rain and hail.
Woo-wee, sugar! Scatter, brain matter,
and the weather’s gray from ear to ear:

a great big blinding flash! Now I count-
down to thunder but it never comes,
which means the lightning’s right smack

dab inside my head—amid the bluff
analysis, loyalty to failures, sawdust,
logic’s cannibals, and balled-up scraps

of cash. It’s raw and cloudy like the out-
line of a candled egg, this facsimile that’s
been over-copied into smutch. Exactly so,

I’m getting hammered; the chips are down.
Shadows drink their bodies up then slip
away. Everyone out there is saying cheese.

And me, me or the demiurge, being half
the source of all I sense, am still not sold
each detail’s burnt into a verge with fact.

—

Will Cordeiro has work published or forthcoming in Best New Poets 2016, Copper Nickel, Crab Orchard Review, DIAGRAM, Fourteen Hills, inter|rupture, Nashville Review, [PANK], and elsewhere. He lives in Flagstaff, where he teaches in the Honors College at Northern Arizona University.