As recollecting
wanes,
I am carving out an
effigy of
Forgetfulness grasping
mangled ledgers
of memory. Look how
it shuffles screens, kinks
files: larceny of
channeled retention
from unmuscled
thresholds and honed lingo.
Its intrusions inhabit
the vacuum.
It hobbles the hinge of
suggestion, the
fulcrum of my textual
clout. Like sleepwalk,
pillowed and
impermeable, it is
ambling the clamped
mansion of my cortex.
Flanked by
Fallacies
Trepidation carved its
corridors toward calm,
tapered-dissolved-defeat, drizzled delicious
consciousness over
recalcitrant fate.
Id been
mechanical, my state diagnosed
as articulated blurs
coalesced
like a burned collage
that inured my mind.
I will not pretend to
forget whats forged
or petroglyphed here.
Years ago, I was
flanked by those
patchworks that made no sense, so
pitiless the swirls,
the burls, the burdens.
My Wife Practices a
Psychotherapy on Me
Using the
Dissociative Experiences Scale
What percent of
the time, by intervals
of ten, asks the
seventh of twenty-eight
hypothetical
manifestations,
do you feel
youre standing next to yourself,
seeing yourself as
another person? Like
that
masked head of the alien conjured
by
galactic metaphysics as an
optical
reincarnation merging
with a
wobbly and thinly white-washed wall
of
haphazard placards? Eighty?
Ninety?
Not-Still Life with
Columns, Balconies, and Gossamer
A shrug from the
universes shoulders
spun over and strung
onto the rungs, flung
unbuttoned, overlapped
over all with
muffling like sleep,
monastical, a see-
through silting and
stowing of shafts, floating
veils that soon enough
damp most meager lamps,
the panes and rails
softened, swirled into orbs,
subsequent crescents:
thinning to a film,
inhaled up into us as
consciousness,
they swim the black and
blue cavities white.
Once,
Subdivided
Like self-exiles, I was
proximal; I
was blue spot-lit, gray
spot-lit, somebodys
sector. I nudged slushy
snow by nose and
froze touchingly,
concealed my seclusion
like a cosseted crime.
I snugged up to
angles-cum-anguish,
to double-crosses,
to vessels and vassals,
harnessed my gut,
my groans. In vain I
trained for inclusion
at tables in gorgeous
chambers of guilt,
black/red symmetrical
graves. Then
scrapped it.
Unremitting
Epiphany:
Shoulders and knees
unyieldingly mature!
Mine slide bone over
offending bone and
puff like tough
balloons, fueling refusal
to move. Once, my
shoulders were boulders. Once,
my knees werent
tricky. Id sic em on lifts
that deep-sixed me,
rips willed invisible.
I saw them
scoring jealous stares, mistook
injury for max-burn
musculature.
They saw the
future, the facts that would soon
ooze, their doomed
hinges undone with stickum.