In blurry confusion voices pierce through, saying
“What do you want?” and “what do you want?”
Blundering, I can’t find my way out of the crossroads quickly enough.
First to know where I am, to know whether I am buying or selling,
threatening or begging. To haul myself off a flashing screen
or a stranger’s dreadlocks as a thousand lines intersect
and cross, stripes on top of stripes as the smells
of sewage and street food intermingle,
and the resulting discordant din.

Then to recognize myself amidst the crowd long enough to ask
what do you want? What do
I want? And when I answer,
do I hear my own voice coming as though from a distant well?
As one note in the hubbub and burble of the human sea?
And do I skim my words like **** from a pond’s surface?

I have not closed my eyes but I have stopped looking through them.
Randomly thawing long enough to realize where I am:
somewhere suffocating, somewhere that closes around the throat
like sea foam: soft, but endless. Scattering
my eyes across all the eyes that bob up and down,
passing and crossing like ships in the dark.
So numb I did not even notice I was drowning.

In the lull, rising to consciousness, breaching the surface
as though for a breath of air. Reconnecting with
and remembering which person I currently am,
and what this person wants: just to be free.
To shake off whatever numbness blended my voice
with the music and chatter and discord of this place
and blurred my face, making me an anonymous limb
attached to a much larger body.
Only now realizing the irony of that condition.