Spell for Misheard Sound

                                                                                                    “7°F last night. Can’t stop singing Johnny Shines:
                                                                                                    ‘So cold in Vietnam, words don’t sound the same.’”
                                                                                                    —Jake Adam York, Twitter, December 10, 2012

Last Night’s Dream was the same as any other:
salt filling the room crystalized and brackish. You
appeared with a keyboard, predicting your own
death: the words might never sound the same
the words might never even sound/ and yesterday
the murder ballads of the evening shifted before
sleep. A poet in a green suit says cannibal/ heard carnival:
the horse-shift of carousels gone dark. We are always
hearing what we want to and always hearing what
we don’t/don’t have the time to correct wrong/
simply the ear demanding its own certainty
like a god. Today I dream of a tragic green
suit’s misfit, the night’s snapping cold, an illness
we chase like a toy/ its own permanent elegy.