when a house on the fault line begins to shift, it isn’t really something that can be seen with the naked eye. It only becomes noticeable once the door itself is off its hinge, forced indefinitely into its frame, never to open save for your daily tackles. it becomes playful, and thinks this is how doors must behave.

your house’s bones, the wood frame of your body leans just slightly to the left, throwing off all balance. windows look down instead of forward, eaves appear concerned, a house’s ears hear you mumble softly into night, concerned about trivial things, and how you will honor it.

climb seven deftly and feel as if you were at sea.

one learns how to operate legs,
and standard procedures in finger movement.
eventually, the career of inhabiting one’s own body becomes routine,
and not to be described as sublime or miraculous.

futures are foreign and wonderful.
or they’re not,
and your perceptors block all that out,
so you may remain in waking sleep,
trotting down express lanes into life as Mandarins,
officiating in a court so rigid.

lady jane uses ashes to blacken her brows.
she does this while yelling,
just yelling,
and ululating into the courtyard below.
bellow.
saul bellow.
and martian heavy medgar evers.
close me in myself.
ready for a road trip.

manipulate your eigengrau,
be more uneasy with each passing millisecond spent in complete solitude with you yourself,
because nothing should scare you more than your mind alone with no hand clasped and anchoring you  to the edge of the pool.

you realize that you wake,
only to create beautiful lucid dreams for yourself and no one else.

you hand the prince a loaf of white bread.
he rises, and from behind velvet drapes,
the day is strong, and proud,
and her harshest light envelopes the folds of your face,
wrapping itself around every flaw,
letting none sleep undisturbed.

you realize the reason you
want to have a hand in keeping him alive
is in his eyes, and how they’re
color of a lake you fell into once, as a child.

wander five feet above,
on a shivering branch.
pink, nubile and unprepared.

south is the wind
and face it, as it pours milkmaid dutch
down the weighed, sagging ravines on your cheeks.
rain climbing eyelids,
wave falling on the sea wall.

“a rumor spread about an area where a ******’s blood was painted on an electric line.”

******, lacquer your teeth.
assume mother’s mantle,
live in deliberate anonymity.

What you may or may not be aware of,
is that at any one point in time,
from the first right step you convey,
rising from a bed each morning,
is that these forward actions are your entrances
and exits from any number of overlapping narratives.

on another morning,
when both lie on either side,
acquaint yourself with one vein-veiled second of 09:00 sunlight,
and you will be well.

you will allow yourself several moments of grace before entering a room.

and we will forget the old ways,
not all at once, but piecemeal.
seconds will escape, one by one at first
and soon they’ll join hands and walk away from our consciousness freely.

when we come to,
we’ll look first at our fallow hands
and then to the ruins of former empires.

so we stumbled quietly into fields and put down seeds.