Finally, I can feel something at the cusp –
fragmented like the withered patina of an aged violin, it started
(as always) with the moon, snuffed out with a magician’s flourish
only to be reignited, as flamily grey as its brooding wallpaper
flickering back and forth in magical tedium as I wait –
oh the waiting, moons and moons,
the spending, the eyeing, the lying –

I’m trying to maintain the bliss like a wall,
but it’s impossible, doomed to fall
brick by thick brick.
My ears are too good; the world seeps in
like tinnitus,
omnipresent and keening.
I’m being pressed into conflated vertices of kindness and pity.
I deflate at the incessant prick of time,
my tongue flaccid as a withering carnation

having fled –
in its stead, sleet slashing my face to ribbons,
heading home to cough up more clear-jaundiced globules,
deformed moons flying down sinking vortexes
like my stomach’s never-ending pit
and basic mortification; its responsive accompanist.
I’m so deeply disturbed, it taints even the Mariana Trench;
I’m beginning to think,
maybe I’m the person.

The person! Everybody wants to be
everybody. Except me, I’d rather be
nobody, holding peace
with red octagons.
I am learning to love and despise myself,
simultaneously,
like Schrödinger’s coin.

Sitting like a duck in my own snow globe,
glances of the world’s moulting
stolen through thick glass;

inside it’s all globe and no snow –

white splashes staining self-inflicted walls,
globe lacking only definite article

to transfigure life from game to play,
play to ploy, to bear down walls
like grizzly polar sun,

doggedly encroaching
upon enigmatic eggnog emulsion
and surrender of sticky yolk within.

You’re welcome! Please,
I cherish, relish such
unyielding dissection;

I, too, am the cat screaming to see
what lies without/within,
the duck’s sycophantic supplication.

Such names, games are merely the refining
of edges, the buffering of sauvage,
and I lap them up eagerly like Santa’s milk,

a deliberate deception; effacing li(n)es
until the glass is so transparent
we could maintain it’s not there.