Back in Time

Time multiplies the images of all those red queens with one black king.
I hear the sharpening of knives, that steel rhythm metallic lullaby
amid the sound of rubber on tile every night, in my dreams,
slapping sounds that rock me awake to the glimmer down the hallway.
Where with you what’s solid is liquid, what’s liquid, gas, flaming enough light
to glow up a dark passage just off black Korean mumblings from the furnace room,
kalbi cooking still. All the verities smooth graceless lies with greasy ease.
Fat perpetually burning, you, of that candle gas at both ends
where everything goes to nothing and to nowhere, splattered flat
among the lies of exponential once-upon-a-times in much unvaunted days of yore,
Nostradamus predicting only the past, the curve of history circling back,
slouching a 360-degree roundabout to the beginning of our dark tale.
I hear the Korean whisperings, red painted lips, soft in the night, red glossed nails sharp,
scratching down in a sweating heave, all small talk not understood, the dirt under them.