LIFE IS A HORIZONTAL FALL

"I...wouldn't do that...if I...were you!"
smiles the mirror

in a voice
silvered with silence.

"Well. . ." I tell it
"You...are not!"

I retrieve my image
from the back of the mirror.

"The bird sings with its fingers. . ."
I say in an Apollinaire-ish way.

This shuts the mirror up.
It not being au fait with the French poets

But, Death takes on
innumerable forms.

Here, it has no human face.

A tablecloth full of holes
more present by its "not-thereness"

than its...
"there-ness."

Only the table tells
what it is.

It haunts me.

"I am the door to your death!"
it says in its holey voice.

There, a staircase climbs into the air
only to turn and return

to where it began.

"I can connect
nothing with nothing!"

so says the rocking horse
staring me in the eye.

Death shows me a room
I will never ever know

as if I were to live in
an installation

in some future
art gallery.

I run & hide
from myself

in my
self.

Death is waiting for me
in my every cell.

She smiles
like cancer.

As Death kisses me
the world turns

on its axis
&

day
becomes
night.