the stairs have stripped their soft confines to lay bare their nails to meet my soles
fluorescents flicker their old-gold hue,
as useless in the daylight as they are in the dark
I pass by the front door on arched toes and look out-
the grass is so green against the asphalt as to become luminescent
I drum my staccato heartbeat against the walls
the beige paint responds in patterns of light in cyrillic and arabic, messages I could never understand, only witness
I am obsessed with almost everything
tracing with fingertips the minuscule hexagonal structure of my own epidermis,
how the mummified fly on the web can not scream in any way that matters- and neither can I.
an invisible repeating line of footprints in the carpet, back and forth
in the same place in the same way at the same times.
a life like a palindrome, tick-tock on the metronome,
we all go back and forth forever.
This house starves its prisoners
I bang at the window
I do not look out the window.
I forget I have a window,
for the curtains are so dark.
I wake with bloodied knuckles
and write them off
I do not go by day or night-
I must have been born asleep and stayed that way, somnambulant bat with giant umber ears ringing with its own echo,
searching for a fly that was mummified long ago
a struck lamp-post vibrating, lantern strobing
like a nightclub overhead a dead road
I am wrapped up tight
an eye is just an eye unless it is your own, then it is a well
a well is just a well unless it is the one you fell in, then it is home
in all the finite immensity of spacetime,
outer bodies orbit in predictable measurements
everything is according to its own set of rules
7 years ago I was calculating for Europa,
just a little bit off he said, without even looking
I lay on the cold tiled floor
my cheek hot as fever
this planet is a stranger to me
I tug on its coat by accident in a crowd
and it looks back at me, confused
it seemed so familiar from the side
I want to fall into it
slide down a rope made up of many other ropes, in vibrant color
crash into a sea of ribbons and gauze
I want to crawl onto the shore underneath the bridge– frozen through
I want, I want
