Photo, unknown artist
On a cool October morning, I lie,
Woodplank back upon the floor,
And here...
My face hides
Beneath my folded arms,
Awkward branches staving off
The epiphany of light.
Too much light, I tell myself,
As if there were such a thing.
It has taken me this long
To get from there to here,
This
Being a measure of My Time,
A certain pretense of something my own
Inside the anonymity of this universe.
Something… what?
I cannot tell,
Nor can I know what thirst
Anguishes my fingers
While my empty palms are held
Open
White
Wanting
To skim the wounded glass of a forgotten window,
To graze the peeling husk of an abandoned door,
To know,
Something was here
But no longer is.
Memory is not such a bright thing,
I whisper to myself.
Some nights it means the tease of non-existence,
Some days it means losing something… twice
Having found it… once.
Are two losses better than one, I ask myself,
When one loss was quite enough
the first time around?
But now,
The palms…
My palms (for I do not disown them)
Are yet open
Like obsessing eyes
Even now
Even… knowing the hallucinations of memory
Are re-losses,
Even now
My palms are
Open
White
Wanting
too much light
To calm the thirst that swells
Like the arrhythmic appearance of lust,
Like a tide surrendering to the moon,
it was not my eyes that followed
but the tingling of my fingers that led
Wanting
To follow, obsessively,
to kiss the empty air in the wake of…
Wanting…
Oh, anguished fingers!
Oh, ailing bones!
