It’s a project. Doorways. Walking backwards through.
Not like entering, not like leaving.
Ghosts know this: not all passages
lead somewhere. Who you are 
and where you’re going are sometimes
unrelated. Where you’ve been might be
the only place you can know. The walls
become exhausted here from holding up
lights, so they go dark. Easier to hold up
mystery than fact, journey than destination. 
This is a doorway and you are halfway here,
halfway there. Peekaboo, darling I’m home,
now I’m here, now I’m there. This is how
loss never ends. Doorways out of interiors.
Interiors glimpsed from doorways, from 
exteriors. Wilderness everywhere. Tired
of assuming civilization’s in there, and
uncivilized is out there. You lean against
the doorjamb, sleep
standing up halfway between.
Walking backwards exhausted, 
a guilty party behind you, or before you. 
How to describe this world 
that endlessly holds its past at arm’s length
and won’t enter its present for fear
of walls enthralled to ghosts forever,
leaving no distance between us
that suspends us in doorways
between what is allegedly safe and 
what’s drowned in flop sweat? Don’t bother,
walk backwards, keep quiet, stay alive
if not free, if not either in or out.