"chiasma" poems
I work for Jones & Co.
You are likely somewhere down below,
I have grown used to this unnatural height.
Once, here, as a younger man, I read articles,
working on cases just long enough to cultivate indifference.
My first firm party, I was made to wear an ivy laurel.
We were mingling on the penthouse deck,
when a gust unceremoniously removed it from my head.
Jones is a superstitious man,
he has a dream-catcher above his office door.
He designed a vaulted spiral staircase on our fifty-first floor.
The one separates Jones from his company,
the other, us from below.
Five years of billing in six minute blocks,
labyrinthine increments, Herculean costs.
A kind of optic chiasma where the nerves cross and people get lost.
B.E. Twain
May 25, 2016
May 25, 2016 at 8:27 PM UTC