INSPECTRE

I still look like something but

often now forget the detailed what.

‍

I am an old hat expert come to haunting, so it happens.

I show up down the main streets of one small town, my town where I breathed before with everyone who’s since

exhaled into a real-life, living still while I —

‍

        spectre spectere spectator —

‍

    showily left the plane, or twice to only keep on coming back to pace sidewalks, pass former restaurants, eye smoking-porches for looks

I would’ve recognized back when —

‍

    in vivo corporealis verum est —

‍

or when I breathe the past in, days I batted lashes over rims of Coca-cola-refracted pint glasses, carbon sparkling with

one lime wedge, a double-pour of sugarcane

fermented, distilled until the sugarcane like me has ended

and in its shape another eddied muddled muddied darker

how you would see if you looked out under your skin,

if you cut windows in —

‍

what I mean is cane replaced with fresh animus,

residue the weight a breath is which you’d recognize under another label, maybe more a mortal one. So here, mere or simply, my answer among a whole.

What’s the name I have I turn my head back to?

    Whisper me out loud —

‍

succarum libatio rum spiritus sancti rum spiraculum

rum succarum rum—

Somehow I walk, evaporate, scent 

streets I leave behind. I walk, I’m rum, 

I walk, I rum. It’s just me

‍

and me with me, the 

ghost of me. One, alone.