Should two dark suits and ties sidle crabwise up the walk, wearing waxen-face men inside, don't open the door for them. No matter how persistently they may knock upon it, no matter how much it might feel like the right and proper thing to do, don't open it.
        But you might find you have no choice -- that your hand, of its own accord, has moved to the knob, is turning it, is drawing the door wide open for them.
        the hardest battle, as e. e. cummings said.
        So if you must, then tell them I'm not here. The same power that compels you to open the door requires that they accept those polite little fictions we tell each other. You could tell them whatever you wanted, in fact: that I moved to Alaska, maybe, or went to Zimbabwe on vacation, and they'd nod their strangely blank and angular heads and leave, scuttling back down the sidewalk to vanish behind a tree.
       Not that it's my fault or anything. I didn't ask for Tabby to knock over the bottle of magic pixie dust, and certainly not onto my Collected Emily Dickinson.
       But he did, and there's nothing they can do about it now.

        In hindsight, keeping a bottle of magic pixie dust on top of the bookshelf probably wasn't the best idea, especially because Tabby likes to sleep there, and he's prone to his sudden enthusiasms and bursts of manic activity. But in my defense, I was getting around to moving it. Eventually. I just got busy. Like we all used to get busy, letting days and weeks fly by as if there were some other, more urgent life we wanted to be off living.
        No more of that now, at least. You ought to be grateful.

        And I could have got the bookshelf's one too-short leg fixed so it didn't wobble, and I could have moved it so Tabby couldn't get up there, and I could have and I could have and I could have... I could have done a lot of things if I could have seen the future. But you can drown your life in getting things done, or you can read poetry.
        I'd just got to #1228, "So much of Heaven has gone from Earth," when Tabby woke up, and if there's one thing he likes more than sleeping on top of bookshelves, it's sleeping on top of whatever book I'm trying to read.
        He yawned, stretched, and scratched himself, then jumped down on top of me, which caused the bookcase to wobble on its one too-short leg, which caused the bottle to topple onto its side, which spilled pixie dust down the shelves. Little bits of magic drifted slowly earthward like flakes of snow on a Christmas night, and it looked just like I'd always imagined pixie dust would look. I was so enthralled I didn't even realize where it was falling until it had already dissolved into the paper in little radiant starbursts of color.
        That's when things started to get glowy.
       The letters on the page flared into luminescent life and began to wriggle like a basket full of kittens. The words unspelled themselves, disassembling into individual letters. E's toppled over into devilish-looking M's as S's stretched and slithered down the margins of the text. The i's little dots fell off and bounced into the corners, chased by a rotund assortment of Q's and O's. Just squiggles now, what had been an alphabet slithered through my outstretched fingers and dripped off the page, falling from table to floor, where they wormed their way through tiny cracks in the wall that I hadn't even known were there until the light of those words made them plain, as words so often do.
        I slammed the book shut and hunched over its empty shell. I checked left, and I checked right, but no one saw me, nor raised an alarm.
        Which made sense, because I lived alone.
        Yet I knew somehow that I was In Trouble. Guilt crept like a slow flush up the cheeks of my soul as I slotted Emily back into her spot on the shelf, hoping the universe hadn't noticed anything.
        But I ask you: how could I have called those errant letters back? Should I have knelt before the yellow wallpaper and asked them to kindly please return? That way lay madness. There aren't rules to magic, nor to poetry.
        So what was I supposed to do? Ask the Wax-Faced Men that: how was I supposed to put those wild lines back, now that they were free?
        Instead, I did the only thing a reasonable person could do: I ate a bowl of ice cream and went to bed.

        The next morning, the world outside the window looked as haphazardly normal as it ever did: the morning air was cool and sweet, the sky was tinged with dawn's first pink fingers, and the brbs were singing Ode to Joy.
        Huh.
        I hadn't thought they knew Beethoven. Or any of the Romantics, really.
        I blinked, and the sound dissolved into random birdsong.
        Okay, so maybe that was a sign I wasn't, metaphorically speaking, in Kansas anymore. Surely, you think, any right-thinking person in a similar situation would have said something to a Reasonable Authority Figure.
        But what, exactly?
        "I'm sorry, but I spilled my magic pixie dust and now every morning the brbs sing Für Elise?"
        "I'm sorry, but now the mice have created a syllabary of flowers, and they've stolen all my daffodils?"
       "I'm sorry, but now the cats have started danc-ing?"
        I mean, not ballroom level, but Tabby's walk was more... intentional than just his usual felonious swagger. Even when Silver tried to jump on the bathroom counter and missed and fell in the toilet, she did it with a sort of sublime grace that was different from all the other times she'd fallen in the toilet.
        Anyway, you tell someone something like that, and pretty soon you have to carry a little slip of paper proving that you're taking your medication.

        It was about a week after the ants had started marching in Morse code that I first saw the Wax-Faced Man.
        I was sitting by the windowsill transcribing their little formic dots and dashes when I glanced up and saw the Wax-Faced Man lurking behind the eucalyptus tree in the front yard.
        He wasn't doing a very good job of it; the trunk wasn't big enough to take cover behind, and anyone coming from the other side of the street would have seen him plain as day.
        But then, he wasn't doing a particularly good job of being human, either: he wore his humanity like a cheap plastic dollar-store Halloween mask, and his movements were sudden, sporadic, and disjointed, like a puppet on strings.
        And really, I don't think he was actually trying to hide. What mattered was the suggestion that he was hiding. Knowing that, we were supposed to follow the rules and pretend not to notice him, with the same kind of polite inattention we give to panhandlers at the bus stop. The Wax-Faced Men are weird about rules that way. Rules calcify our lives around us, and they accrete new ones, like a snowball gathering mass, until we're buried beneath the avalanche of their weight. That's what the Wax-Faced Men want, for us to live like hermit crabs within the confines of our daily routines. Remove the part that thinks and feels and let muscle memory take over.
        He saw me and scuttled around the tree, headed for the front door. I ducked down below the windowsill.
        Knock-knock-knock.
        "Don't answer that," I whispered to Tabby -- but despite that warning, I found my knees wanting to unbuckle, my feet wanting to get below me.
        Knock-knock-knock.
        I had to fight the temptation to respond. After all, that's what you did, right? When someone knocked, you answered the door. It's a Rule. And there's a certain part of us that's inclined to follow rules -- like that rolling snowball, we naturally go down the path of least resistance.
        Knock-knock-knock.
        Without quite remembering how, I found myself at the bedroom door, my hand on the knob.
        Three times, right? That was how many times you knocked and waited for an answer. Everything came in threes.
        "What I tell you three times is true..." I muttered -- and with that, the spell was broken, and I was able to lower my hand from the door.
        I staggered back to the windowsill, strangely exhausted, and peeked through the blinds to watch the Wax-Faced Man scuttling down the street. His arms and legs seemed to be controlled by two different brains, and watching him, I found my own joints beginning to ache in sympathy.

        I learned not everyone could see them. Acknowledging them took too much mental effort, and for many, it was easier to just fill in any bits of inconvenient reality with a sort of mental test pattern. Most people only saw me, madly flattening myself against walls or ducking behind corners, frantically muttering poetry to myself like a warding prayer.
        Which admittedly wasn't much different than usual.

        Once you see The Wax-Faced Men, you know what they are. You've always known, really; you just hadn't known they had a shape, didn't realize ennui could become incarnate.
       They scavenge unexamined lives, gobbling up the hours we waste on TikTok and Reddit, growing soul-fat on our boredom. When you look back at your life and wonder where all the forgotten days went -- the Wax-Faced men took them. Like termites, they hollow out the days and weeks, making gray holes in the calendar where your true life should have gone.
        They don't like it when people fill those hours with purpose. It starves them. They would prefer if we all just got on with the business of surviving, without all this frippery of playing music and writing poetry and running ultramarathons. The starveling universe is quite aware enough of our existence without our incessant screaming of "I am!" into the void.
        And now they were looking for me.

        I called off sick from work. I hid in the house, scanning the street for signs of them. I recited whole chapbooks of verse to drown out the knocking at the door. They wouldn't come in, not without an invitation; so long as I never answered it, they couldn't ask me to Please Explain Myself. There were Rules, after all, and they worked both ways.
        But poetry, like any addiction, takes stronger and stronger doses to work. One day I snapped to consciousness with my hand on the front door knob, mumbling "the Carriage held but just Ourselves-"
        I yanked my hand back and grasped my wrist lest my fingers get any silly ideas. I slowly stepped away from the door, muttering "Once I decided / to trade my body for a breath-"... that was modern enough it probably hadn't had all the meaning siphoned from it. The knocking ceased, and with it the compulsion, and I was able to let my guard down enough to calm my nerves with a bowl of ice cream.
        Poetry was a living art, like dance or music. It lost its power the more rote it became. It wasn't enough to just repeat the words, no; you had to feel them sear across your brain like bolts of lightning illuminating the dark corners of the soul. And if you let yourself get distracted, you'd find yourself opening the door.
        Because they'd be back, I knew that. And one day, they'd win. The Wax-Faced Men always won. That endless, monotonous repetition in the face of exasperated, desperate effort -- that was their power. And you only had to slip up once.

        The more I thought about it, the angrier I became.
        I mean, if you didn't want poetry getting loose, maybe you should have kept a better eye on it. It wasn't my fault it was just sitting around where children and small animals could get at it. And besides, the world was still only a little bit weird. Mostly just around my house; the effect seemed to taper off once you got to the sidewalk. I hadn't spilled that much of the pixie dust.
        At least... not yet.

        I started with Mount Clutter, by Sarah Lindsay:
        "...Go on rummaging / brushing off dust, though you may find later / that it was the dust you wanted..."
        Indeed. A little sprinkle of pixie dust, and all her elephants and dinosaurs were stampeding off the page to the sounds of tubas and circus music.
        Then it was on to Kay Ryan, as the world turned lilac and I heard a bell ring in the distance. Then Langston Hughes, Paul Lawrence Dunbar, and Gary Snyder, smelling like hay and sawdust and foggy coastal redwood mornings.
        I woke them all up, and when I was finished, I still had a little pixie dust left. It didn't take as much as the first time, almost as if the idea of freedom was contagious.

        The pixie dust? It's everywhere, once you learn how to see it. I got mine from Ye Olde Shoppe That Wasn't There Yesterday. It isn't there anymore, of course, but there are other places: used bookshops, antique stores, places like that. It's everywhere you haven't looked. Just like poetry.

        The street was empty. I clambered out the window and scuttled down the block, keeping to the back ways, the corner cuts and secret paths we learn as children, avoiding the streets and sidewalks, the places where that Wax-Faced Shadow falls across all our best intentions.
        I scurried past the convenience store, dashed past the laundromat and darted through an alley. From there, I had a clear path to the library. It was nearly empty at that time of day, and soon enough, Rilke and Hirschfeld and Borges and Basho were free to scamper away under the aisles.
        On my way out, I sprinkled the last little bit of pixie dust, like crumbs of sugar cinnamon, over Where The Sidewalk Ends.

        The morning news radio's blare jerked me back to unwelcome consciousness. I knocked an empty ice-cream bowl to the floor as I flailed about hunting for the snooze button. The weather report brought me to sudden full consciousness:
        "the cloud's small tears:
        broken branches scrape
        the sky's grey belly"
        It wasn't good -- not enough syllables, for one -- but it was a start. Then came traffic:
        "I celebrate the snarl, and sing the snarl --
        And what I honk at you shall also honk at,
        For every horn belonging to me as good belongs to you."
        You could always tell a Whitman fan.
        I opened the window to let Tabby in, and that's when things got weird. Like, glowy-kitten weird.
        The sun was rising, but not as it had ever risen before -- no ball of flaming gas lit the dawn, but something so overwhelmingly real you understood why they once worshiped it as a god. It dappled the sky with spectrums of champagne pink and lavender, faint blushes of rose and dandelion -- colors so true they must have always been there; I'd just somehow never noticed.
        The brbs, finished with Beethoven, had moved on into symphonies of their own creation. The air thrummed with their unheard subtexts, sung in notes far beyond the limits of human hearing. And that was just my neighborhood!
        Under the sea, whales sang miles-long symphonies that echoed across the world while oysters wrapped pearl sonnets around bits of biting sand. Mountains groaned, composing perfect crystals larger than boulders; sestinas of amethyst geodes and verses of ruby, sapphire, and diamond, even though there was no light to make them glitter.
        I'd done it. I'd finally really gone and done it. I'd let poetry loose, and now it was everywhere. Every living thing, infused with a kind of itself-ness, strove in whatever manner it could to express that self to the universe.
        So that ought to be enough joyful noise to drown them out.

        At least for a while. Because they're still there, the Wax-Faced Men. They're always there, waiting to make life grey and dull and boring again. To convince us that time's only worth wasting, so they can feed on our astonished bliss themselves.
        If we stop, even for a moment, they'll come back. And knowing that we know how to keep them away, they'll wipe the slate clean and start over.
        They've done it before. Where do you think all those dinosaur bones came from?
        There's only one way to hold them back: you've got to live every day as hard as you possibly can. Do whatever it is that makes you you. And never stop doing it.

        Or maybe you're thinking to yourself that crystals aren't poems, that flowers are flowers and trees are trees, and music has always been beautiful. Nothing's changed, except in us.
        And you know what? I like your idea better. It would be too frightening to think poetry had that much power. Maybe all it can do is help us see what was there all along. After all, poems are just words on paper. Those can't change the world. They can't make brbs sing and dinosaurs grow feathers. Poetry can't rearrange the stars.
        Can it?