Say Goodbye ‘Cause I Can’t by Daniel M. Shapiro

Since the smog stole their light, her dog has had no use for eyes. She had sneaked her tools in his chew toy, wrenches rolled on drivers. She told them the urns were Mom and Dad’s ashes. They didn’t check, didn’t see the inner frameworks. In the last days of alliteration and rhyme, she had learned lefty loosey, righty tighty. There was no mnemonic for altering the shape of gravity. She would turn all the pendulums to metronomes, set them at 90 beats per minute. Time would become currency. Anyone who needed to flee could buy a small piece of allegro or presto to skip past the powers’ permanent andante. She needed to tweak the portion size so days would not end early. Ultimately, she would like to turn magnetism into reins, slow down the turbines, clear the skies. She would return light to its proper speed, set the blinders on fire.

*Title is a lyric from “I Can’t Wait” by Nu Shooz (#3 on Billboard Hot 100, 1986)

Daniel M. Shapiro is a special education teacher who lives in Pittsburgh. His book of celebrity-centered prose poems, How the Potato Chip Was Invented, was published by sunnyoutside press on New Year’s Eve 2013.