For Sylvia
You were yr own Hero—
gold Narcissus-
flower turned to lead
Water turned to
ice—alchemy of
death. In your mind,
objects turn
and turn and they
whirl themselves
into static.
You own a million
postcards of yourself:
faded photographs
of statues and ghosts
and a shrine, erected to
your image,
in your mind
which is to say, in
Your house, and
everywhere
When water turns
into ice, it whirls
into stasis with a
deafening flourish
Then, materializing–
a glass
icon of yourself,
chiselled out of
frozen time. That
infinite quantity–those
Crushed bodies, those
long-gone heroes. Castle
walls would not protect
them. And you were all
alone, in the doctor’s
office. A sphere of
soft light, surrounded by
a harsher light–a
Splitting pain–forceps,
scission, the film ripped
from an eye, the fathomless
Glinting fields of
Glass, or ice.
–
scd nt s prfc
My last lover
told me she
believed in
no afterlife,
and in that moment
the aura
surrounding her
dissipated.
I felt sodden;
betrayed
by materiality
We were (only)
objects
hurtling through
space, always
inevitably apart,
maybe it was
heroic to have
tried to hold
on even for
our brief
interval
I been sinking
further into
my brain, time
unspools like
the parasites from
the guts of a
pig
We had a
mutual fear
of children,
fertility–how
easy it was
to generate a
life with a
careless gesture–
but
what grew between us
was worse
A nihil, feeding on
our little silences,
our turning-
away,
feeding on
time, turning it
against each
other. Even the
air, the simple
dead air, started
to have
implications
like it
had been
laced with them
I wish I could
beat time at
its own game:
bring me my
knife, bring
me my machine
for spelling
terrible equations,
for
bringing the
end to my
hesitance.
Down the barrel,
in the waiting
room, there
is a voice
pointing at me,
saying “you can
write your
story with
me,
you can end
this
chapter”
