After I had scoured the day from the
palms of my hands,
(it was aseptic, anyway, and
invisible)
Six burning bells rang in my ears—
last
hours of the day – slumped over in
the train,
my spine forgot its
dignity.
Narrowing forward folds of itself,
absorbed
somewhere inside coat and scarf and
reminders of an outside elsewhere:
Such tight disdain for full spaces,
I couldn’t enter— though finally
I did ( français oublié )
every step forward
drawing me back. Anyway,
you’re reading this over my shoulder
in the subway
he’s reading over my thoughts in his
bed
(either one). Some other refuge,
warm and lost like us.
Still, the ears are burning and now
they’re not
alone, fire seeping into every space
beneath
this skin, sweat from nightmares
stinging life awake.
Such meaning we find in a stale
clinging to phrases,
because why not, what else is there
but our own
uncertainties? (I decided not to ask
him, in the end)
And even here, even now my
fictions are not
saving me. Eyes slip off these
pages, glossing over
and at last it’s just the
eyes. So many screens later,
Staring staring staring
two-dimensional patterns;
disgust and grief and guilt looking
away and my eyes met his, or…
Then they were all burned there, as
images, effigies
(not flat, but fully-formed) in my
mind, nails in his shoulder,
the afterimage of an inflamed nostalgia,
relic from a past birth
haunting this unsuspecting
consciousness—a trap?
Such confusion is the friction we
need to survive,
the lost breath re-invigorated with
whatever oxygen.
And my clean hands are staining
themselves from the inside out;
No pretension of dirt. It’s
all in your head, they say,
and above all these words, do you
still feel sick?
After all, it cannot be what you set
out to know.
