POEM

Dearest, I am part-you 
in a wood of pearly treetops
or are we pincers on this nightly nipper 

when we fell & the hundredweight 
became one? My Thirsting Else 
believes in all-things-possible.

Octagon of roadblocks examine 
vintage experience with silence 
I recognize. I’m not asking much

to be loved, but I’m in the curving 
background, recognizing you 
in the rebound I can’t breathe, 

viewed as a common fossil. 
I’m finished with words. 
I’m better off sleeping

although it is neither your 
lapse nor an accumulated cumulus 
of shakeups duping the sky of my life 

where automatically horrific pain 
haults itself around my defaulting, 
of which perpetually clashes, crashes 

similar themes & why should I need 
to guess-game where I’m headed 
in this dry-tempest sandstorm? 

Get thee behind me, Pain! Ha! 
but it never does: res ipsa loquitur. 
I should disappear in defense, 

backing up against the wallpaper, 
blending into it, entering the next phase
outside of my comfort zone’s discomfort . . . 

reasoning with disorder, reasoning 
with fuming against my own 
melancholic incense 

as if I’d walked out 
of the mind of a scorpion 
just before the strike.