we stand in stagnant shades of grey
with dark blue, for a change
and positioned between us is a
series of pregnant pauses
giving birth to discomfort
more common than our common conversation.
i am suspended between the metal spring
the dust, the cushion,
and the stone fall.
i admit to you: in my daydreams,
though i bump my head and kick the cat
and wake up too late for coffee,
have to write on my palms to remember your name
in my dreams
the writing rubs away off the skin on my hands from holding.
and the people smile under their hats at me
though it snows so hard it’s swept under the couch
and in my daydreams: i can finally hold
all the warmth in the world effusing from bodies
i cannot feel, will never touch
and when the temperature rises, i go outside after the rain
again but
the rain doesn't culminate on the evergreens;
i shook the branches to feel the balm on my shoulders
but the dryness overhead displaced me
in the absence of water.
don’t you stare at me
i am not great now; i am lying with the insects
to come up with more eyes to see with
i, this great essence of grotesque
but i must compromise my greatness for ever
dancing, eating, loving, finding some reason to pray
prey upon the bliss so truant from my mind.
i feel i am some monstrous vermin,
nameless and defiled, simply tossed among the files,
which has absconded, so punished,
from the living room floor
to under the couch.
i admit to you now, though you look at me
with vacuous acuity:
for all i know, my life was accidentally
whispered on a freudian slip
of paper from God’s pile of post-it notes
and carelessly tossed into the
eternal blue flame.
but i am no fragment
i am no flea nor tick nor
scorched typo
i am less monstrous than the universes between your eyes
which will never shine on me
we guess, we categorize, we think,
we sweat beads to make a necklace of labor
and pass it down the generations
as an embellishment of humanity
and with hallowed bird’s bones do we rip apart our wishes.