Desperately seeking an immediate antidote
to relieve this sudden noxious fever,
a serious bout of sickening confusion
spiked with a sweaty vertigo at the oncoming awareness
of so many enigmatic and far-flung cultures,
raw lands of sticky green junglesnarled hills
and steamtopped mountain summits
colliding here in this climate-controlled moment
with a dark and indolent December-in-Chicago,
from these bunches of gaseous yellowing
bananas hanging next to slick plastic cans
of greasy coffee beans from Peru, to those
deep pink hibiscus flower two-dimensional caricatures
fetishized perfectly into corporate logos—
I fervidly began chanting,
quietly but discernibly out-loud to myself,
some of the coldest
words that I know
in order to hopefully
quell the delirium.
And those words
were these,
and in this particular order—
grave.
lone.
winter.
stone.
and last,
but not least of all—
silence.