Unforgiving wall braces my back.

Just seconds before the door slammed,
I truly thought I'd appreciate quiet.

But now the empty air constructs barriers so claustrophobic that my limbs won't twitch -

Forget functioning.

A single carpenter ant skitters across the floor before my grass-stained mesh sneaker, as if called from the slimy couch shadows on cue.

And then another.

(Note: The poet is self-conscious enough that he needs to say : "The following should be horrible writing, but after hours of thought I couldn't think of a better phrase to express our ill-fated protagonists' malice towards these insectile invaders than": )

I hate them.

I told (The One Who Escapes) on Monday that I'd handle the infestation.

Every time I saw an ant crawling after that-
I felt a swarm of mandibles tear at my brain tissue

and a burning in my intestines courtesy of burrowing.

A feeling that's amplified ad nauseam by current cacophonous quiet.

(The One Who Escapes) bursts back through the door, gasping for breath and blabbering with darting eyes about:

"They're coming right now!

We have to go!"

Floorboards carved with poems and littered with moth carcasses

rot under pink light tendrils spilling from the dust spattered windows.

I crouch in the corner and gouge my findings regarding the wondrous color into off-white wallpaper.

Looming pine silhouettes

watch vigilantly.

(Though I suppose that's the perspective on life that got me into this situation... Not enough of us listen to Galileo while he shrieks about the stars swimming.)

Perhaps apathy.

Cherry-blossom twilight mist -
hand of the sky grips my skeletal wrist and
records the history of a pebble

with gnarled fingernails.

So, here's 'The Wallpaper Poem':

If I'm to believe the tales,
the entire mechanism ends with me anyways.

The explorer buries his shovel in the earth yet again
A once satisfying sound of metal piercing loose dirt
Now increasingly hollow
He makes not a sound yet he creams
This is the spot
It has to be
Deciphering the ancient map consumed his mind
Roiling ocean and nightmarish jungle decimated his body
Time withered his soul
And now his first glance of the tree carved with eyes
A moment that sang of golden cities
Eternal life and the true words of God
Is the echo of an echo
Of a memory
Dissolving into the suffocating heat
He knows
He lies to himself but he knows
Because this is everything
And so with a primal desperation…(xForever)

Jill hoped to be the President of the United States
Jack dreamed he would become a professional baseball player
I want to wake up feeling good about myself
Satisfied with my presence alone in a world I can recognize as profoundly beautiful
Jill works in IT for a mid-sized frozen food distributor
Jack died when he was blindsided by a drunk driver

My eyes flicker open
The universe flutters away
Dreams like sand
Grains dissolve through trembling hands
Tip the hourglass and let butterflies fade
Giving way to crashing waves of grey
I’ll return to my kingdom in the clouds
If I can just get through the day

Songs without birds witness eternity
In the smoldering crown of leaves
Their melodies seep through the open window
Sap from the weeping oak
I see myself dwarfed by the forest
Oblivious to the inferno swallowing the trees
I can’t call out
So I listen

I am the hivemind architect
A venomous arachnid
Designer of this sprawling web
Silk strands drip with vitriol
My thoughts are a poison
Leaking from an abyssal well
In the garden of wither and rot
Taking root in their brain stems
Until we all hate me the same