poem 2, spring 2022

I am standing in front of a window. There is a disco ball reflecting light onto me. I reflect.

My body’s been released recently,

Eloped with gravity, content

Each roll tumbles closer to the floor

I am only twenty three, mind you!

So it’s hard to see the sense in it all

As light speckles the wall behind me

Flecks land on my stomach, its breadth

Made true by the vastness of the sun

I turn, the light is on my back

Behind me lingers the impossibility of

A different kind of youth, a sweet,

Hopeful eternity of valleys and craters

I am hills and plateaus today

Rolling, but finite and lush

Gravity has less to say back here,

Behind is suppleness and vigor

My cheeks are on his only pillow,

Grabbing at his inevitably navy sheets

My wake is pitch black, my stomach

And chest too, revealed sourly by

The singular beam sneaking under

A door that’s been locked for a while

My back is a very famous bridge

The nearby clock is consulted again

I can see the sense in it now

The plummeting cliffs, the eminences

My landscape is for the

Expansive windows and disco balls

Which I have granted it,

Not the grunts and shifts of

A man that glances at the flecks

And flicks the switch on the wall