It was cold & the sky was too red as the sunset came too early - my brain was spinning with those letters & numbers & they were falling out of my ears. I looked at the asphalt and I saw my past and future yawning out - both in the same direction on the one-way road but my ears were too cold to listen, to learn. It was too austere in the building & too frigid outside & too glacial in the car picking its way home through the ice and old snow. It was too much too few & not enough of anything at all. & it swarmed. Threes with wings and velocities out with compound eyes buzz & sting & leave me paralyzed, there on the curb.
what sleeps in the forest beside the highway? what lays its small head on dismembered takeout boxes and curls up beneath plastic bags emblazoned with ‘thankyouthankyouthankyou’? does it give thanks for small polyurethane luxuries? for the refuse it calls its refuge? what feeds on the grease and fumes from the roaring mechanical parade? does it lick its lips afterwards? what learns to cross the glimmering cement - first timidly, then wanton and triumphant after practice? what watches? what does it notice? what emerges from the forest beside the highway, large and lumbering, to repay the generosity of its benefactors in kind?
quite literally they cannot spill out of my mouth into the toilet bowl fast enough green, neophyte, insensate swirling around in the clear, shallow water, they almost look like they are swimming ancient, ferric, turpentine its midnight on sunday afternoon and the morning never felt so far away verily, salt, halcyon pulling the lever, they swirl away, the letters sloshing together into a murky soup gestalt, vermilion, fear they turn into equations with no solutions when i bring my hand away from my mouth, wiping ouroboros, nineteen, baseless i know better than to brush my teeth golden, gale, corridor i know better than to go back to bed right after demilune, murmur, mirror linoleum, throat, nightgown listless, lucid, dreamer
holding the box between two fingers so it does not fall the hand is not pandora’s; she has been dead for centuries inside the lid, an amateur’s attempt at a cumulonimbus the sky behind them greener than the clouds before a tornado the clouds themselves whiter than the dust after what will become of the box? will it house bangles and bracelets and small forgotten memories? will the hinges rust and the sky become separated from the ground? will it ever find its way home?