Lost in an Elaborate Castle

Without you I am luminous, and must remain so, for only in such luminosity do you appear. Emily Dickinson trailing her fingers along the banister, slowly ascending from the kitchen where she was baking bread, to the bedroom in which she will write that her life is a loaded gun, which she has been thinking about for days. So much happens when we say "maybe" instead of "yes."

Books of poems on the little table by the bed. Let us not study war but peace.

Cobwebs in the front stairwell and a dim light which makes one think they perhaps overestimated the nineteenth century. Certain Eddie van Halen solos that made you realize playing fast wasn't the sine qua non you'd long thought. We have these lists, we have these ideals. Actually, time does not pass - we do.

Holes in the wall through which rats peer, waiting to see who is there to see them and who is not. When we are free, we do not think in terms of freedom or its absence. Oatmeal with and without raisins.

Falling asleep reading, waking up to her gently removing your glasses murmuring "I've got it, it's okay, sleep." 

The goddess for the moment making no big deal about being a goddess. Sunflowers loosening seeds, the last Monarch butterfly of the season perhaps. The distance is monstrous, also a chapel.

Nihilism is a dark sea, you sit on its shore for years and then wade into its low waves, and sink below its opaque surface, and there is no cure for this but this.

Late but not too late learning the peril and unhelpfulness of charm. You make this prayer of me and I forget what I am, lost in an elaborate castle made of ritual and repetition that you designed.

My heart is a birdhouse, my brain a garden, and my cock - that luminous interrupter - is a bookmark.