What does it mean to be lying on my bed

and feel nothing belongs to me? The world is…—

 

Detached? /

/ Simulacrum??

 

—have we finally reached the place where the movie

I’m watching is more real than reality? The irony: the movie

 

is The General, from 1926—the movie is silent, is black

and white, is the kind of thing made when morals

 

were loose and people noticed because reality was still

a thing that existed, a green light’s flashing, if distant.

 

It is December 2022—here is Pennsylvania—I am Lizzy,

now a poet and a wife. These should be my anchors,

 

but I could just as easily write: it is April 1865—here is

Washington D.C.—I am Dolley Madison, once a First

 

Lady, now a painting. Maybe it’s not that things

are less real, it’s that we’re noticing how categories

 

always have been just that: categories, nothing more,

nothing less. The words that stood for something

 

have always been ink on a page. The land we stole

to give our noble ideas a home, a real place

 

we could defend … — In China, people are

waving blank sheets: the thing Kaminsky

 

said he must write upon over and over, to keep the dead

from waving flags of their surrender. The dead in Urumqi

 

are still dead, turned to black ash, while white paper

protests catch wind. Over and over. Maybe simulacrum

 

means this: not that reality ceases to exist,

but reality has always been a place    beyond what’s left to say.