Glass Poetry Press

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Volume Five Issue Two

Fred Longworth

suddenly, you realize you're trapped in a movie

and some talking head in the audience is yelling at you that you can change the plot and script at any time, but no matter how hard you try, it always seems that even your struggle to change the plot and script is part of the plot and script — and up-bubbles the memory of Sunday school where you studied foreordination and predestination and tried to shove their square pegs into the round hole of free will, and Mrs. Lafferty the lay instructor phoned your mother and said you were the only child who kept arguing with her, saying how the pegs didn't match up with the holes and that faith wasn't a big enough hammer to knock the corners off the pegs — and now you're sitting alone in a coffee house in the hour past midnight, remembering that at 9:00 a.m. yesterday you got the results from an MRI, and you don't have the cancer you've been worrying about for weeks, and you stretch out your arms like Moses would've done if he'd decided to leave that stone tablet where he found it atop Mt. Sinai — and suddenly you're reminded that your old girlfriend Carol wasn't as lucky as you, and even as a tear gathers in your eye, you feel freer than you have in months and months, and you don't give a shit whether the plot and script were engraved in stone long before you were born, or whether every moment the original text is pouring from your pen