This is the witching hour
I guess it’s where my fears are born.
Though
I’ve been awake all day
Maybe it’s just due time to let the critic loose to play.
Welcome to my Alcatraz.
Where the prison guards are swayed by inmates to turn their heads to
Watch while the prisoners dance around.
In my head is a dance I wish I could confine to waltz in circadian rhythm.
Rather,
A Demon dances in contemporary style
Double time
Pas de chat
Toothpick pointe shoes pinprick in pores
Skin tears like curtain in different directions.
You can’t see, but now there’s a cavity
Curtain call
Let the darkness come through.
He’s waited all day for this welcome from you.
It doesn’t have to be warm
He knows you don’t want him here.
It’ll suffice just thinking of him
Think of him? He’s heard you, he’s here.
Don’t get shy
He can’t help that he’s a compulsion, my dear.
He articulates and accentuates
The back of the house can hear him.
But even if you can’t
Like the weight of the world I feel him.
It isn’t often that he leaves me be
But sometimes
I left him lonely when he’s sidestepped by she.
Our lives were touch and go
Always somewhere else or going there sometime.
I hold onto the memories where we stayed on the same plane in my mind.
If we weren’t independent collisions both headed off course
Maybe we would’ve found the time to make this work.
Time isn’t our friend here
We’re racing it, we’re racing him.
I never stopped counting the days down until I’d lose a friend.
We counted three days up to feel like more than that
We felt like that: infinite and beyond free.
(that isn’t a feeling that comes often to me)
I get lost in the story stowing itself to me
Captured in that infinity.
Eventually I return to lock with key
Slipping through the door and back into that misplaced part of me.
I left it aside, but he didn’t leave me
Crawling back inside, “the lights aren’t on”
“sorry, I turned them off to see.”
(This is where it gets me)
They’re on—happy?
Of course not.
Satisfied?
Until he speaks in whispers of dirt and debris.
This nonsense
This travesty
This is my reality.
I am the idealist, the realist
My life plays out of that of a surrealist.
I didn’t know these rules could bend
My mind keeps snapping them, laying false promise of hope near the end.
The end like a horizon—shit, it moved again.
Feet chained and buried by sea kelp and sand
The waves a vicious cycle of never-ending plans.
The same ones, day in, day out
Through and through
He’s never going to be finished messing with you.
Can’t burn, starve, drown, or wait him out
I’ve come to realize I can’t be God
He’s always ten steps ahead.
If I were he’d be a death row prisoner
Take the walk down the hall
Get out of my head –
He’s better off dead.
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