Excerpt: Realia by Michael Trussler

Ars Poetica 

 They asked me how long I’d been in
salvage-espionage and hullaballoo sign
repair. Take some time, I mean, give or
take, it’s all in your head, right? Realism
beckons. All you need is

 a laptop, a manipulative
childhood and a bag of sizzling
thunderclaps. A satisfactory
soundtrack. The talkative
and unraveling
brain’s
            a baggage carousel. Decorative
tinder. An invasive plant called complicity. A
voice-over mentioning what remains
to be said isn’t done much any
more. Afterthoughts of what
will have happened. And behind
which door did your lover learn to harness
nonstop hypnagogia? To be fair sometimes 

 people are ghost-mushrooms speaking
complex sentence patterns via electrical impulses
and other times a person is a peripatetic dog and a bicycle
wheel withdraws into a wilderness of teeth— 

Stay with Me  

 1.

Not so easy to forget the puppet show of my past
lives. Might anyone have left some instructions 

 behind? What can that possibly mean, I ask
the child sitting in front and behind me. 

 There, there, she says. I’m a lot like you.
We’ve unskinned. The thermometer’s 

 reached green. We can wait it out. You
keep saying that. I’m formless again. It’s 

 O.K. Hold still. The laptop’s decoding
cyber-colour and whispering karmic self-
pity for the second time. And no word of ours
has ever managed to escape. Not in the realm
of the possible. Not my line of mimicry. 

 2.

I need to let happening go. Meanwhile
a bottleneck event’s under wraps. It’s 

 O.K. Be beside yourself. Expiate. Do
you want to stay with us? We live 

 under real time. A verdict. Here’s a
red ladder. It can be your superpower.