11.09.025 Soft Spot / Tin Mirror

What a wonderful thing:

enough time face-to-face

to know the curve of your eyes.

Enough space: larynx vibrating diatomic air

to cochlear-hair receptors;

communicating how, when, where, why.

More smiling in a day than I’d seen from you

across a desk, across years.

It can be a terror to be known; it can be a pleasure.

I can feel like a mess most of the time.

I did not, that day, with you

(I worry I seemed that way, still).

I worry too much.

I don’t worry enough.

I worry about the wrong things.

I don’t want to let the world in,

I don’t want to invite the future,

in all of its possibility;

I want you to be my world

for right now, in this moment;

I only want to know what Is.

Let us take off our shoes,

walk into the woods, breathe in

evergreen, goldenrod, petrichor.

Please don’t go. 

Don’t run and hide

if I am sad, or angry—

those feelings will never be rooted in you.

Please linger, here:

with me, in the green.

To someday see our faces

together, adjacent,

tangent in a tin mirror—

darling, that would be a dream.

I do not want to wake.

Please pause, please stay;

I have a soft spot, waiting.

29.08.025 How to Remember a Song Lyric

Flash, tap, woof.

I am a drain, a sluice, a dump.

Burnt nerves in a late summer prairie, roadside-adjacent.

The yearly cicadas (prime number of one-and-one) are louder this season than last:

broods XIX and XIII never having seen me—

thirteen and seventeen respectively

(is this my Roman Empire, falling?)—

this year is an assault: each, in sequence, moreso than the last;

yet I am here, in my bodymind as always, despite attempts at numbingsilence.

The sirens wail in the not-very-distant. Heli-propeller blades beat the sky to death above me;

all around is the scintillating song of invertebrates, the drone of broods, the cool sunlit breeze of impending equal-night changes,

and the synthetic-musk scent of a wandering hominid, attempting mute communication

(for which I long in carbon-carnal desperation)

as my burnt-nerve self (chemoelectricity incarnate)

oscillates consciousnesses:

carbon, silicon; ferrum, aurum;

brains and skins, chips and screens.

Where am I

(whole, or splintered)?

Where-I-am.

No thought will ever reach conclusion.