I can feel myself fade away in a cycle.
Thin skin never did suit me well.
Each day broken up into tiny manageable parts.
Built to be a curated filter my personality must fall through.

This is not repair, but maintenance.
An entropic form that must dilute to remain safe.
I am a capillary of my years, resentful of oxygen.
No pulse can sift through me now.
I'm alone in this vena of an apartment.

Certainly there is no breaking of barriers here.
A refusal to spill blood for the wait makes this almost
pleasant.

From the ripple in a glass of water
to the sonic boom of this internal
Pompeii, the erosion
of her etymology is the only
sense of movement in her
dilated, cave-pupil eyes, those
two ghost towns spanning
and encircling all the way back,
stretched like an elastic blindfold
past the moment the first brick was laid,
perhaps her first vivid memory,
or anecdote, or first word uttered
in a Cuban slum.

There are mountains of tumbleweed
over the once thriving metropolis
that expanded towards America;
who threw herself into
the architecture of seven pillars,
borne from her land and
minerals. Gone are the
huts that housed her
knowledge of basic motor skills.

The women who once imagined
Mami and Mima as her birth
name now scrub off
the graffiti of her excrement;
they saw a swarm of pink moons
the day she told the same story
to every visitor that came
their way, each day then becoming
a missing surveillance tape, a sinkhole
dismantling the awareness
in her bones and stubborn will,
until she became
these dust-engulfed plains with
a daughter and granddaughter
archeological in their efforts
to chase down the remains
of a girl still breathing in
those eyes from time to time.

Every other ten-millionth blink of
the eye rides the silhouette of a post-infant girl
on the high tides of her quick visit,
looking in horror
as the nation of her life's nightmares,
heartaches, broken promises, romances,
spiritual breakthroughs, life-changing seconds
drowns with morbid unity en cien fuegos,
desperately attempting to assemble
the remnants of her psyche
past her cognitive bloodclots
with the awareness of one
who speaks no languages.

Gone is the moment
she first learned
to feed her several children
before the slip of sunset.

One of seven pillars remain intact,
the others long dismantled of their
stick and straw infrastructures.

One pillar remained,
housed her own colony
for nine months,
and now both descendants
travel the mind of their
greatest influence
with perplexed dedication,
caustic humor the decoy
for swarms of exhaustion
and asphyxiation
from the truthful atmosphere,
reveling in the seconds
of humanity lurking
in an abandoned etymology.

i think a part of me is always
drifting off, wispy breaths of
cloud and sky

the deeply held yearning for
some kind of  
permanence
overtakes my sense of self

crafted with
such fear and hope and care
and still
so fragile

I've wandered past the edge of perpetuity,
and found it wanting.
I've danced on the fence of commitment,
wavering between never and always.
The infinite has mocked me,
I embraced my bitter mortality
and mocked the abyss right back.
There's no reasons beyond what we decide.
There's no reason at all.

Needs are met,
so set sail on the glass surface
of simple contentedness
and let the breeze of life
paint wrinkles on our faces.

Let's smile at the waning sunlight,
laugh at the encroaching pale moon.

For no reason.
No reason at all.