Recycler

Remember seasons? Seem to recall those once were easier.

Reasonably sequenced, regal of tempo and temper,

Reliable change flipped heads-over-tails each quarter,

Recovering the hemisphere with four fine suits, knock-off designer.

Recently, someone shuffled, cut the deck into disorder:

Relapse, tic, hiccup, snap, weeks reissued like hipster

Rediscoveries    ...    join the club! No closer

Reading required to diagnose this crazy weather:

Record highs, flourishing lows. April even crueler

Recapitulated each fortnight. Spring hailing like a howitzer.

Reek of summer tickling autumn’s automatic sprinkler.

Redder-neck sunbathers burnt by November’s toaster. A warbler

Retweeting Keats, well into winter. A death for Easter.

ii. funeral: march

Remember: misremembering that fishy Faulkner

Remark, the dead are never passed. Ask: will this chapter

Retain familiar cycles? Lather, rinse, repeat. Swelter,

Reins, release. Welter, ruins, reseed. Seconds per

Revolution: top-heavy spinning, simian moods over-

Reaching from swing to swing. For reveler,

Read revelator: elevator going upper, downer,

Results of a heart dialed three degrees warmer.

Remedial Ecclesiastes: a time for X, and a-whole-nother

Reciprocal time for X’s refrain, a dinner

Reservation for six — make that five — and an altogether

Regrettable time for the long and short divisions of disaster.

Remainder: only a matter of time. No more time to matter.

iii. scherzo: presto chango

“Remember, the world’s stage was not set for your metaphor, Christopher

Rex, tragicomic motherfucker:

Recognize, why don’t you, your relish for the realish, for hinter-gatherer

Relationships between the dank diamond mine of  your inner

Resources and the Real World (remember that?), our fixer-upper

Residence imperiled enough without your cheesier

Regrets stinking up the joint — shoulda, coulda, woulda, Gouda. Character

Reassessment sure is fun, but don’t run down the theater.

Regards, Responsive Reader / Longtime Listener / Other: _______ ”

(Re: that critique, one childhood scene I’ll offer:

Relatives teasingly wondered why my “gatekeeper,”

Regulator of mind and mouth, would wander

Regularly away from his post. Still no answer.)

iv. finale: re-fugue

Remember with me (it’s not all mine to remember),

Remind me, under this never-better weather, whether, if ever,

“Real time” and its dead-ahead march to an unlucky number

Really feel right as a royal flush, since time seems so much fairer

Rewound — recoiling counterclockwise, the seasons’ order

Restoring, entropy decreasing, days uncreasing — now faster,

Regress infinitely, till the Spaide family tree, our off-kilter Calder,

Recollects its fallen leaves — relief, pains, laughter,

Reverse it, past, even, it’s not — trust I tamper

Respectfully, gatekeeper, but why not even further,

Reductio ad absurdum, back to the very scene I enter

Rehearsal, ninety-nine degrees, summer-hot, set to simmer,

Ready or not, on the twenty-first day of December?