from psychosis
by its paleness. Whereas
even the bleakest,
snow-blank
day in February
is all shot through
with stinging
vivid filaments of memory
and the richness of the longing
for the sideways
glance of spring—
the end of the show,
where the ache
is extinguished
is a blank soundstage,
stripped of its old
garish game show sets
and backlit
by the weakest dangling
strands of winking bulbs—
as if the antidote to depression
and anxiety was
a kind of blindness;
as if the runner-
up prize,
so long denied,
was an end to irritation
and negation of striving;
as if going nowhere
and doing nothing
were the grand culmination
of yearning for something.
