You seem bubbly today- it’s just a chemical imbalance- soon my dopamine levels will stoop below the norm and I’ll be crawling back upwards with tiny fingers gripping the brain that I have probably taken advantage of. You seem bubbly today- it’s just a chemical imbalance. Went out last night and let my mind balloon outward, the lip-smacking tang of pilsner washing out the smoke on my molars that I silently savor.
It’s just a chemical imbalance when I bounce on my toes and
Feel my heart part the sea of space before me-
Suddenly people are presents that I am eager to open
And I want to look around the corner
But it’s just a chemical imbalance
Could I do the same thing tomorrow, or the next day
When everything has leveled out
And I feel the grassy plain surging before me,
Vast,
Void,
Vacuum pulling me inside my mind-
A claustrophobic cavern-
The space where I reconsider
The way I move my lips
And direct my eyes.
I will murmur to the end of the tunnel.
Until I can escape,
See the green unfurling before me-
Billowing,
Beckoning,
Breath bringing me back to myself-
And run
Run until I forget why I ever wanted to look back,
Until I don’t know how I could have ever fallen down
There…

Within some experiences I am “there,” within others, I am “not there.” In the latter sort, it is either anxiety-laden hyper-awareness or sardonic dissociation from minutia-made-material. In the former, it is effortlessness, freedom, gliding bones through sea, the waves pushing me down its throat and breathing me back out, moistened and changed. In both forms of existence I find myself; this is not something to reconcile, but to accept. I have realized myself as one contradiction—a noose round the neck of a flower, a gardener of thistle and thorn. The blue sky stretches across the horizon, and my mind removes itself to a distant branch. I find myself both here and not here. This space between body and mind is the closest I have to freedom. And so I add a layer to myself, or uncover one. And this, always, is where I find purity, where I comprehend the contradiction, where I taste the essence of that which I cannot otherwise know.

I wait for the winter like a wind-up bird, chattering its chipped porcelain wing—the music box croaks on for my finger still trembling, an intermittent sweet note gliding away like a fugitive tear. I crane my neck in vain against the days growing shorter, the nights deceptively embryonic—I swim in them. Eventually the water and I become one languid body, a vinaigrette left to sweat, a sad salad. We do alright, we do with the flies. One wing tip-dipped inward, this one never thought he’d come too close, that one never thought, head fully submerged in a bowl of subtle acid soup.

And then the ladle-eclipse, its gorge swooping beneath me, engulfing me in its inverted belly, my limbs gangly-dangling like lifeless antennae. Soon I am spooned onto a saucer and served to the Universe’s most pretentious dinner guests. Old Man Winter is the first to **** his pongs about my tender torso, and I am reminded of last season’s stinging and stabbing, though I manage to escape unscathed, however canned and stored in the crowded freezer. There I forget the Sun. I forget how to liberate my emotion, how energy can become a circuit of temperament. I am released when the Old Man retreats. I remember the post-circuit-breaking fear of being thought crazy, of the accuracy of those perceptions. I re-experience the cackling pleasure of moving against the grain. I learn how to harness and channel high frequency vibrations.

Flattened and sealed in the sardine can I healed. I grew in the dead of winter, I grew even when the goblin would meet my gaze in the mirror. I hear the ticking of the bird but now only in my left ear. I peer into the future and watch the bird fly away.

Effortlessness is what empties a room- a mind also being a room- and extends a willowy collection of bones that you hope you can touch in your attempt to communicate the context of the rooms, so that the enigmatic hand might grasp at least a flicker of recognition that the moment has passed, and now She must be going, receding ever sublimely into the airiness of a nascent week’s end- how contradictory- and so am I, begging for peace and quiet and crawling instead into the raucous night, like a blind centipede that is expected to scare away the house, making the true Resident Rodents their rightful place at the throne- the bejeweled Rat Regent rules the underworld, but She has ignored the portal and it has vanished- perhaps never there in the first place- perhaps She and the Rat King both made of smoke. A vestige of a vapor. A room within a room- windowless, wall-less, and wafting in and out of seeming existence like a flame- could it have been the same flame as was before? Could ever a flame be reborn, revived, said to have previously existed? Can one say this flame could not have already been? And is this room, this space, new or old? Perhaps recycled? Is it a fluctuation, regeneration, or is it a continuation- like infinite space? And when considering infinity, what to make of repetition? Pattern, even? What is to be said about consistencies? What can the ants see that we cannot? What is this perspective that we are given? And by whom? And our language- where does it bring us? To the next essentially empty room? Or do you feel the life pulsing right under your very nose, in the hidden eye of the void- do you sense the deaf-dumb omniscience of consciousness? And is it growing or dying? Is an ice-age approaching, or truly, is this a momentary lapse of reason- a period of time where reason (matter and the mind) take shape in the disembodied womb of consciousness? And how can one ever measure a moment?

The woman in the waiting room
In disembodied space,
She dug a hole,
Pale,
And fell into it.

She digs holes and dances ‘round them.
She dug a hole and danced around it.
(She…
…She…
She uses gendered language)
In the next room they try to fill holes by digging them.
She tells them this is backwards.
You will just make a larger hole.
In the farthest room someone sits across from you, telling you how to feel.
But all things become lost in the hole

All things but the pale

Underside of a leaf floating atop an unnatural calm
Wind
Or water
And the pale face
Standing atop the bridge
Drinking in the cold,
dark,
space
reserved for the unborn.
She cannot enter it;
The hole will not go deep enough
This time.

The water was quiet and unruffled:
Though intemperate winds blew on it
Ne’er once did it ever really stir
And we got so used to its pervasive presence

In line with global trends everywhere
We took notice only when loud waters bubbled
       Like wayward children we scoffed
       When delectable words of wisdom
Wafted like therapeutic mist out of Wisdom Well

But now that the well is empty and dry
Our deprivation begins in earnest
And soon, very soon, nostalgia will whip us
One and all till we learn the bitter lesson:

That second chances belong to storybooks only;
Now that this veritable repository of true wisdom
Is in other dimensions our dilemma cries out
Who amongst us shall quench our thirst
Now that the water in the well has dried

I regret
That I have yet
To barrel down a bannister
Take charge of the floorboard
And command a room,
Silent and full or
Symphonic and fractured
My perceptions
The hungry trees
Of a hungry forest
I do not regret
Having entered,
So I cannot regret
Not having done so.
Some places I imagine
Feel like
Orpheus Looking Back
Feel like
The preference
Of Pleasant Death.
You ask me why
I will not go,
I say
Because,
I Will Not.
You ask me why
I am afraid,
I say
I am a flame
Entombed
Who still feels the wind.
You ask me
What is it most
You fear?
I answer,
The flowers
In my head
Not sick,
But dead.