I wake up to a ring over the sky every morning;
It is not the brilliant sun or a mesmerizing whirl
Of migrating birds, it is not a halo of clouds
Ensconcing the world as a crown Domini of Alterity—
It is, of course, encircling entrapment
Of a very peculiar and particular happiness
Claiming to be what makes life worth living
And the worth of living life, the price of only being—
Westerly blackness confuses my perspective
Since the eye’s machine does not, as it is purported
To do, give us sober access to the world—
It inverts the world. So, I am looking at the abyss above
Ignoring the clouds ground below—
Human is that abyss, fantasy the ground,
The mind’s I is the flimsy bridge
Round bright screens closely wound
Reconfiguring, transposing orientation
So as to make sense of it all.
Strangers, the Other, my walking iteration
Wearing companion mask in a one-man show
With lipstick drawn hastily in the prettiest places—
I, too, want to be pretty
Yet, it’s sand through these hourglass hands
Shadowing through terrifying refractions of light
That, slow to form, would not provide comfort
Were I too see them directly, anyway.
Made lethargic by composition,
Despite the sprites accompanying,
We look for crystalline hands, or some kind of disturbance
To give us what to grasp for
Something to cling to.
The ring, the annular prison, provides what purchase
Needed, but it does not release it hands
Without bearing its claws.