Revisionist Poetry – “The Calendar’s Teeth”: On the Cruelty of Waiting – Grand Displays of Imagination, v.6

The calendar above the sink is a slow abrasion—
dates rubbed down to the pale paper of patience.
A stack of unsent postcards fans like wounded birds;
the stamp-side of hope is blank.

Night folds into night and leaves a note: no one came.
Footsteps become a rumour on the other side of the wall.
The phone sleeps face-down like a withheld name;
sometimes he imagines a knock and wakes to the silence.

Impostor sits in the chair and teaches the clocks to lie,
winds them backward until the mornings forget they were offering anything.
His fingers trace the lower-left corner—an address without an address—
and the studio answers with the smell of old coffee and lost mail.

Waiting is a small animal that chews the hems of his patience—
it leaves him thinner, but also able to hold the smallest light.