people ask me if my brain has started rewriting itself
If my consciousness expanded to take up the space left behind in these two months of rapid decline
Maybe in the week my eye has refused to read street signs and text messages

I am asked If I start hearing people’s locations as my sight slips further out of my reach
as if this is a neotech drama about self awareness and I am Neo
I just need to wake up, take a pill and I will harness the Matrix

more aware of my lost ness of my smallness
Of how I am I insignificant and absorbed into the collective strangeness of a crowd

It is not a different kind of light or of seeing but a falling darkness and sensing things in the night, when bats are flying low and recklessly close. When I feel the current swell around me as the unknown let’s me escape in previously grandfathered ignorance.

Tonight I am not ignorant. I am looking at a blank and dismal map. It is not filled in in the slightest.
I am rust and berry pulsing within a thick cracked skin in a sea of unbeing, only aware of where I touch the raw, colorless, and endless universe
Intensely attenuated to my body curled in fetal position
against the thickest nothing I have ever encountered.

like a slumbering geode
Filled with colorful secrets
Poised to bloom
I wait
But rocks sleep forever

Cupped in the belly of my palm
this grit-ridden
hand-held cave you gave me
right at three years
appearing on the outside like pale skin
after leaving sunscreen an oil spill in the pool
and burning
patchy and bronze
although I took silver
each time your voice rose a flame
in the gust of its crescendo
the gemmed insides of this Earth piece
looking too much like the shards of glass
that would explode iridescent
in fist-fights with paper walls
fragments gleaming like ice crystals
daring their toes over the edge of a roof
leaving accident’s name a mosaic of wine
all over the floor
and my jaw hung open
as wide as the geode’s
only its jagged teeth shimmer
rather than break
when in opposition with force.

This rock-body knows rock-bottom
replacing softer limbs
that had once retired themselves
like scissors that fit right in with my hands.
I am trying to relive a good day
the beach right before my eyes
this jewel-thing beaming white under the licks of the sun
glimmering like the salt of sand
and solstice iced over the delicacy of sea itself
reminding me for the last time
of when you were nice.

I swing my arm behind my back
and give this geode a fair chance to sprout bird wings and fly
make its place
amongst all other
shiny ocean fixtures.