When relocating bugs
we advise cupping your free hand around them
as you would shield the first, delicate drag
from a freshly-lit cigarette.
Protect that tiny flame from the wind.
Opening my eyes underwater, only to see innumerable
shades of blue, blurring into one another,
sets some reflective part of me trembling.
Not in fear of the magnitude of that chaos out there in the wide ocean.
I terrorize myself.
Sometimes,
when I walk out the door,
I look out over the houses
and watch the sun shatter
the clouds, watch the light
play on brick walls, watch
the gentle curve of the hills.
Sometimes,
it snows, and I look up
and watch flakes hit my face,
watch them melt on my glasses,
watch the sky
dissolve.
Sometimes,
I look down and watch
the sidewalk pass by.
There's a hedgehog in my stomach,
and sometimes, she gets restless
and when she does, her quills erect
and her claws send shivers up my throat.
I live in fear that this hedgehog will escape,
and so every day, like Penelope in Ithaca,
I rebuild her cage.
And every night, she rips it up again.
Pain
is distracting
when my body turns against me
all I can do is
turn back.
Too much of this
to drown out the static in my head
maybe I should just
tune the channel.
In my dreams,
I am a fluttering thing,
attached to nothing - the memory of some child's hand on my string.
Around other people,
I can pretend everything's all right.