Summer morning.
Recrossing the borderline from the afterlife,
the dreamer is expelled from sleep, the dream lost.
I am a dream’s shadow,
heavy with transition, jagged from sleep.
Light gathers me from every room I have ever slept in
onto the shrinking island of the bed.

Someone cues the poetry. Unquiet lines.
The past was worse than you thought,
voices say.  Your life is a weighted skin.
Stop swimming against the tide of loss.
Sink.

Yet gloom is porous.
From the sky’s cracked mosaic,
Daybreak seeps in.
The light reassembles familiar objects,
which replace mere longing in ordinary darkness.

The things of the world resist but return
to radiance, resume the work of existing.
We are all day laborers.
It's my shift. Summon the coffee.
The world yawns before me.
And I am, therefore (I think).

At what point
did it start?
they ask.

An endless rhetoric,
slyly demanding
unremembered
histories

I don't know.
a simple answer

feelings  do not
come into your
heart with
warning

they bang on
your rib cage,
a dull echo
shuddering through
your body

I am not
a moment
captured  in
a photograph

stained sepia,
a sliced negative

It did not
start with
the click
of a clock

stopping the
hour hand
at twelve

it consumed me,
slowly. The sea
does not devour
the sand with a
single wave

it is the
onslaught of
sadness creeping
into your blood

a parasite,
a lowering of
cells

it is
criminal,
and I am it's
victim

as you try
to execute
my misery
with pills

(electric shocks)

crisp white sheets,
pulled so tight
they feel like bandages.

Wrapping around my limbs
until I am paralysed
with emptiness

one bed, one desk,
one chair

a tick sheet of
sorrow that I am
now pinned
to

like a butterfly,
living for only
one day

but pressed and
preserved

indefinitely

smoke stacks babble their chemical love note to the gods,
huffing and clawing
and spewing their pumice
at the morning sky,
a milky stairway to heaven
dispatching
the greasy whims of a faceless man with an unquenchable addiction.

it towers over the overstuffed veins of the highway,
where a once square body
contorts its aluminum frame to mimic the spiraling form of nature,
spilling its fleshy guts into dry winter wind.
the steaming rubber neck of the world cranes itself
longer than the Mississippi
to gawk at its own mortality.

in the distance,
the steely blue city veils her face with haze,
stoic and sturdy, she stares into the thin air
past the ardent, bleeding
display of humanity
gushing
awkward onto her concrete stomach
and staining the stubbly black and beige
with sticky finger prints.

the city takes a long drag off her metallic cigarette
and sighs
exhaust,
blanketing the sky in morgue sheets.

I curse my body daily.
Waking up with the sky, my tongue
lashes red sunrises onto my thighs,
my lungs vacuum a familiar
poisonous plume. Oh!
the relief of mortality!
the sturdy promise of decay!
An ancient blood pact with the moon
turns me sour at her zenith,
and I slink down in my weather-torn coffin
smirking with anticipation.
Crashing waves of maggots pour
over and through me,
shaving away this amorphous effigy
to dust, debris.
Released back to the soil,
soaked in dew,
reformed in clumps by absent-minded shoes,
bled dry by stelliferous roots of sycamores -
my body giving birth to life
in ways I never could before,
in ways only revealed to me
by death
the spurious specter becomes pure again.

i fear i am
translucent
and
forgettable.
a vapor that is constantly
dispensing
and
dissipating,
accidentally breathed in by absent-minded victims.
forming weak phlegm at the back
of numb throats,
coughed out with the thought of too many cigarettes.