Dr. Kane X. Faucher		Knucklewalking: Romania A curtain of light flutters shimmers, Snagged in the drab grey plumage of a pigeon on the square, An intercalation of luminescence Animates the grey, the pigeon lustrates opaline. I watch as it hobbles along on its gnarled knuckle. The knuckle taps and cracks along Austrian cobblestone. Still it ambulates As above and behind the baroque villas Rise betonnage, the staunchly robust but empty concrete husks Of a now-defunct regime ruled by secrecy and Static geometry. That which has afflicted this pigeon Happened even before the first brother informed on the other Before the Ribbentrop pact Before even Decebal chose his captor below than on land. History breaks the hands who make it. The narrative instrument has its revenge, A juggernaut wheel that wobbles and drives its snow chained tread Into bruised earth. And in this history, in all history, A floor is just a bridge between two walls. A whole people hobbles On a dry broken knuckle toward an uncertain future. So long one one’s hands, one’s knees, one’s own face, one forgets Even the possibility of flight unless it is the flight of those Who yearn to make their nests beyond the chasmic sea. And so, on this chapped broken knuckle, This blind man’s cane that taps a lamentable rhythm, Traveling in a crooked circle as if to trace The contours of a faded memory and an already broken future. The women lose their leaves The men do not come And the children are sold to a plastic smile And servitude at the altar of paranoia is paramount, eternal. The sense of home is jettisoned by a recurring illness of spirit, The syph of corrupt minds, the progressive paralysis of indolence, The influenza that feverishly abolishes hope. The pigeon continues to walk the length this broken knuckle chooses. And so the sun flares for nothing And so the spirit burns for nothing And so the knuckle splinters itself against the demand for motion. And we went there So as not to be here. Both aimless and empty, rimed with the frosted cilia of resignation and Consigned hopes. And now, at an all-night bar, We huddle around amber lanterns Whose unfiltered oil makes us both quicker and slower, As we raise them and drain them pale To remember and to forget That we all hobble along this collective broken knuckle. For scraps, for crusts, barked into fright. Down the hill, into the night, The moon draws the curtain And we tighten In rigor vita To sleep, never perchance to dream again, For even these are worn smooth and dull As drab and grey As the plumage of the flag Of the pigeon As the barb of history buried under old flesh. Struggling in reticence, our hand compromised, We hobble toward that goal at the end of the square, Forming a crooked hypotenuse with our trajectory. Romania, mon amour: A crack of insomnia A crack from hyperperception A crack from a glance A crack in the looking glass A crack formed from neglect A crack at the dawn A crack among the cracks A crack with a rivulet of beer A crack for a time A crack running the length of cobbled stone A crack dividing into her face where the nose would trace the mouth’s corner. A crack in the hairdo of Eminescu A crack that temporally divides non stop from itself.