who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel?

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’s orbit,
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