Jiordan Castle, Picture This

I feel bad for the inventor of Comic Sans.
I, too, have made mistakes.
Like opening the bathroom door in a bar
to a stranger rag-dolled on the toilet,
her face closed for the night.
I, too, wanted
the impossible—to carve a hole in the floor,
retreat
into lost time. Earn someone's forgiveness,
maybe even
my own. But, instead,
I accidentally invented panic, then futility.
I wanted to forget
what I had seen, who I had been,
so I turned us both into flowers.
I invented bees
and a yellow bird to watch over us,
but it wasn't enough.
Others had already invented doom
and repetition.
I cut myself
a break, fashioned a little
more time—enough to learn
which mistakes were mine to make.

The Surrealist

Magritte is said
to have said that
everything we see

hides another thing, that
we always want to see
what is hidden

by what we see,
& in his second painting
of the lovers,

with their mouths
seemingly
pressed against

each other's through
thick white veils,
I don't know what is

meant to be hidden
from me,
except perhaps

Magritte's dead mother, who died
by drowning—
a suicide,

her body pulled
from the water,
nightgown

wrapped around
her face. I admire
Magritte's defense

& disgust—
the idea that
her death had any place

in his paintings, no,
the obscured faces,
their opaque longing,

no. He is said
to have said that
his paintings conceal

nothing, that they
evoke mystery
& that the answer

to the question
What does it mean? is
nothing, because

mystery means
nothing, because
mystery is unknowable.

Sometimes
a veil is just a veil &
sometimes a veil is

everything
we uncloak
in order to see clearly.