there’s a glass panel stretching from
the center of a cold room
predictably, it’s white—
how we yearn, fall (prey) upon
minimalism
you’ll see eventually,
those long years of others’ silence
communiques on a one way trip
you’re finally catching up
fingertips on the pane
catching on the view opposite.
sloshing around, crystal
warms by the low lamp
indistinct as the murmured
touch on your arm, the light
twist at the collar
you gaze, a luminous abstract
buoyantly, absently present
a coolly held circumference
stationed in the quiet
past a long hall greeting
where you clipped the dark.
how can one stare intently
with no recollection?
45 minutes, maybe more
you can be whoever you want
facing down those towering
organic spires you’d
love to be miserable,
strangers blackened in
dusty twilight, pure, white
piercing eyes,
scrolling, mechanical
whoever you want.
sometimes all it takes is
a little twist, window panes
curling like ropes of smoke
everything is possible
in midday indoors
spying yourself across
the room, enjoying the playdate
as much as interest
in two new people over
espresso
brick by brick we’ll seal up this wall
until gazes may no longer meet,
a quiet separate from beyond
our means.
jagged barbs can only puncture,
for that is how they’re made;
wiping your sooty brow
as you clamber from the wreckage
around the scorched earth halo
imprinted at impact,
you wheeze a little gulping down
oxygen, struggling to stand.
as an old strain, one i’d forgotten i
had once remembered
rises from the settled stillness
i’m grabbed by a pure velocity
tumbling blind down a dusty
shaft, blind from the streaked solar
enfilade ghosting seared gold
gathering at the vanishing point.
scenes i know play back at a glimpse
at a distance so close you can reach out
and touch,
models encased in hard crystalline—
my hazard suit grasping
clumsily, my agency an irrelevant gaze.
funny, your choices of fashion accumulated
over the years may have such an
impact on perceived constructs of sensibility
after so long a silence
shirts and jackets and ties you
loosen slightly when taking the train across town,
nervous expectation underpinning
yet not outweighing unmet shock in
all that is new.
threading through iron strands of wild vapor,
pearl-handled crags intoning their whispered
glossy grit, a monochromatic savagery
beheld ultima thule:
pale-eyed solipsist, your blinding grasps
beat a tinny ambulant in inch-blindness
when, some mornings past, twisted blankets marred
a torpid dull
and, temporally, epochs passed since
your salience lighted floral tones.
doggedly here
cultural nirvana gives off a powerless embrace
feet planted in delphic, extant locality
as sovereign as trivial.
i’ve come to rely on you, slowly
like a sopping paintroller gliding over a liquid landscape,
lulls washing through chamber-canals as cayman sedatives
tied, hopelessly, to this janus consciousness.
