Nathan Spoon
Forever Tympanum
People invading our houses are sliding up banisters
as we sleep. As we sleep locusts and dust are drawn
into a whirlwind of elliptical proportions. Somebody
turns the cold water off and on leaving us asking
why it was on to begin with. Somebody else lifts
one corner of their mouth by using its other corner.
When I think about you I cannot resist hoping you
are thinking about me in turn. A page in another
book is identical to this page in this book although
neither of us knows this yet. A fish in memory is
smaller now than it was originally. Once in a distant
kingdom a dragon went rampaging as a hero was
being born. Her mother lived in a small room of
the castle’s lower level. With the world above being
bathed in fire the tiny hero cooed and drank the milk
of her first breath. Her father was away measuring
the beginnings and ends of conflicts while standing
briefly in various passages and doorways. He loved
looking four ways at once. Nicholas can you feel now
the fire of your stone touching stone touching stone?
Nathan Spoon reads “Forever Tympanum”
Nathan Spoon is an autistic poet with learning disabilities and the author of the debut collection Doomsday Bunker and the chapbook Fail Better! Feel Great!! His poems and essays appear or are forthcoming in American Poetry Review, Crazyhorse, Gulf Coast, Poetry, Poetry Daily, and the anthologies How to Love the World: Poems of Gratitude and Hope and Sonnets from the American: An Anthology of Poems and Essays. He is editor of Queerly and an ally of timemedicine.org.