Perfect Disappearances

This poem is for all the writers

writing. On their laptops, desktops, smartphones,

legal pads, napkins, palms

of their hands — desperate to get it down

before it disappears

like the phone number of the most amazing person you just met

and have to see again —

just have to — so you write it on your own skin

and walk off into the world alone

with the whole world in your hand. God

help the writers in love with the words that disappear

like disappearing trains you catch

by running after them,

losing a shoe, a hat, an earring, a spouse — a lifetime

of chasing the disappearing words,

breathlessly reaching for them,

grabbing ahold and hoisting yourself up

onto the caboose, entering the rhythm

of those corridors moving through the world

as you move through them, feeling your way,

looking up and down and all around

in search of that most amazing

dream you dreamed and followed all the way here. 

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Paul Hostovsky’s poems appear and disappear simultaneously—voila!—and have recently been sighted in places where they pay you for your trouble with your own trouble doubled and other people’s troubles thrown in, which never seem to him as great as his troubles, though he tries not to compare. He has no life and spends it with his poems, trying to perfect their perfect disappearances, which is the working title of his new collection, which is looking for a publisher and for itself.