1. The Magician’s Exit Wound
All day
the sky has the look of dirty paper.
My shadow stays indoors.
I watch its step,

and plan my tricks.
This evening,
the loneliness of disappearing acts!
I think of

poking my head through the sky,
and, in those frozen pressures,
of breaking into
blood on a cloud.

2. The Magician’s Ride to the Hospital
Just now
I noticed my arms,
how they act without even telling me anymore,
their preference for rain and razor blades,

or for simply dropping off,
like forgotten two-by-fours falling off
half built houses.
Now they grab at me like stubborn interns.

                                             I turn quickly, mirrored
in the dark glass of the ambulance,
where already
my face is wood, and painted to a doll’s
astonished whites and reds.

Outside even the sky is shocked and darkens.

3. Magician’s Face
One day all the smiles hardened;
pals frowned like a firing squad and closed in.
So I got lost in
cafeterias,

in the waiting rooms of airports,
and tapped my fingers,
until I was 
alone as a paper scrap under someone’s heel.

Then a funny thing happened.
I did a real trick - 
sitting still while a plane roared off,
I made a face like 

a single window smashed and bare with sky.

4. The Magician at His Own Revival
Once I thought my mouth was a scar
that disappeared 
like spittle being wiped off of a plate. 
So I shut up

and sulked 
like last year’s inner tube that hangs
in a noose all winter
through the rain.

I sat through the chatter.
Then somebody bared his teeth and jeered.
I rose. I called out
like a blind man drifting on the drifting ice,

for no reason at all but me, me. 

5. The Magician’s Call
Our conversation
frays like an old wire in the rain—
its thinness crackles.
And there’s a silence as the phone’s hung up,

as frank as someone’s heels walking out.
Outside in lightning,
the palm trees whiten quickly and go bald
as the fronds crack

in the wind.
“Eat shit,” says someone pushing me away;
and my father’s 
vanished with a smell of fear and forever

just under his breath in the static.

6. The Magician’s Edge and Exit
I’ve got my edge now—
as a lone end of a sheet quivers on the line
and waits for the
flick of someone’s nail in the wind,

and a lost
pocketknife rusts on the railings,
where the fence boards warp and blister.
Now driving I whip

the wheel back and forth—
as a frayed tire skids on the ice,
and a back fence looms like flesh turned inside out
in the noise.

And I drift through it, suddenly air.

7. The Magician Ending
After a while my lungs give
like shale keeling off without a sound.
And I don’t hear anything as I let the flesh go,
and open out

like a diver,
my arms spreading beyond their own nerves,
as a shrug of stars and years
drifts through me.