Visualization

Your pain is a television
mounted on the wall
at the Dunkin Donuts
where you sip your coffee
and look out the window
at the trees. It's difficult
to ignore the peripheral flickering
distracting you from the poem you want to write
about the trees. You have tried
changing your position. You have tried
changing your mind
about the television, giving in to it,
giving the television your full attention,
being with the television.
But the only thing that's on is
so bad it's sickening. So you just
keep on looking out the window at the trees.
It's winter or late fall and this one
sickly-looking tree across the street
has snagged the red kite
of your attention. It's almost completely bare
except for a little red, and it looks like
a cancer patient in a johnny with
its butt hanging out, and a red
kite or mortification in the crown.
And it seems the poem is beginning to take shape
inside your head in spite of
or because of the television. Because just yesterday
at radiation oncology where
there are no televisions so everyone
is usually reading or talking or sitting
quietly alone with their thoughts, there was this one
sickly-looking guy coming out of the changing room,
and he looked like this tree with the red kite in it,
because his skin was kind of gray,
and tight, and peeling, and his arms were
lifted up above his head, his hands trying
to tie the elusive string of his johnny
which was like the string of a run-away kite,
and his butt was hanging out, and his television
was laughing at him, and your television was
silent. Blank. There was something wrong with your television.









Paul Hostovsky's poems have won a Pushcart Prize, the Muriel Craft Bailey Award from the Comstock Review, and chapbook contests from Grayson Books, Riverstone Press, and the Frank Cat Press. He has been featured on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and The Writer's Almanac. His first full-length collection, Bending the Notes, is just out from Main Street Rag. Visit his website at: www.paulhostovsky.com.