in duplicate

(note: a lot of the white space used in this poem did not show up when posted.)

This is your category:
Staking out campfires on the
waiting, like bricks obscuring confidences
of homeless boys in leather shoes.

Scribble love letters on paper plates,
burn them when finished,
finish before you begin
and skip step one, like worthless cretin on old bread,
forget to be eaten.

Make a house out of butcher paper
watch soda tabs hail onto blacktops, and paint
it's a new home
paint it with carbon dioxide dyed brown, making packing paper
stained teeth, rotted out, flesh sick of 'the moral high-ground'
make the dwelling into an envelope
send to tooth fairy, hope for quarters.
This weight is ineligible.

Reach, like she did
and remember that the Eid al-Adha printed on recyclable paper
begins at sundown
you were too busy making love that day.
Meld into time, forget existence
existentialism
existentialist—through anecdotal evidence
be saved by God.

Discover that the only way to win is to spill
like soup, the cloaked woman's soul
through means of blue dry erase makers
the way we came when our fringe was cut straight across
remember what she stole
never forgive.

This is your category.
Did you forget?

With packing tape send out confirmations,
everything lost inside a photon,
quantized,
in sets of two, because nothing left, waiting
nothing else, remember
broken hearts must be sent in duplicate.