Monday, May 22, 2017

DAILY HABIT

How can you ever begin
to tell them—why it is you
have to write this?

Explain the nearly visible idea,
translucent
like a wraith-like raven,

like a razory, bag-of-bones bird
always nibbling,
always needling away

at the sharp peripheral
corner of your mind—relentlessly

pecking at your temple
while you try
to sleep at night

and always perched
upon your shoulder
and cawing—in that distinctive

scrape-smoldering
caw of his—any time you're awake,
as if he's saying

something about—
diving deeper.

Something about
some divinely comic inspiration

spelled out in quivering
motes of dust

in the stretched afternoon
light of a yellow happy tapioca sun—

the same one that warms
and lulls and will
one day, kill everyone.

Something—about holding
your breath for four
or five years (yes, you begin to imagine,

you could do that), just to hold
for one posthumous moment

in your cheeks and your toes,
in your bowels and your knees;

that sensation of
orgasmic relief—fierce spiraling rockets
splitting the ozone,

fireworks so white-
hot that they're
soothing—slingshotting

out from behind the wide
whites of your eyes

and smacking
against the back of your skull—
which, incidentally

goes a lot
farther back
than you ever thought—

at the exact,
ecstatic second—
when you just can't

seem to
stand it anymore.