I see a star. Or perhaps
it’s a piece of light
coming to me through
a pinprick hole in
black fabric. I don’t know
what’s real, what isn’t, what
is cosmic and what is prosaic.
All I know is I’m cold.

All I know is that I feel nothing
for a moment between
observation and reaction, between
the true thought and what
I choose to select for it
within my soul, my bag
of emotions.

I see a star or perhaps
it is something else,
a plane at night or some satellite
put there by a team of serious men.
There are ways of telling them apart
but I choose not to now, not
to tell right now what mystery this is
representing.
All I know is I’m still cold.

All I know is I’m still feeling nothing more
than confused and yet holding steady
between surety and cluelessness, in the gap,
not lost at all but certain in some way
of what I am — the only man alive
on this rock of mistakes that will
somehow resolve itself
if I just wait.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
onward,
T

Before sunrise
you wake up to suspicions
that you are not the same person
you were at bedtime last night;

you don’t feel as you did then;
your dreams were absent or broken;
you slept like a dead fish,
or a soldier slain in war.

You don’t think the same things
you did last night;
you weren’t as marvelous then;
you changed your morning routine
and did last night’s dishes before breakfast.

You ranted at the cat, wishing he was a dog;
ranted at the dog, wishing he was a person;
gently chided yourself for the shouting
so early, afraid of the tone it might set
for the day and you saw yourself
as a lump on a log, on fire
among a field of old tires.

Impatient, you wait
for sunrise to change the day
to what you expected;
you are helpless as you wait
and marvelous as you wait
and doomed to a life you never asked
to happen, not at all;
every little occurrence comes up
as a tell on your remaining game
to remain the same;
did you imagine this
would be the result —

that you might wake up in a room
from a poem written long ago,
a poem you wrote when you
were alive and thrumming intensely
to the corresponding live world?

You wake up
and you are someone else —
except you aren’t truly someone else
but the same — sad old man
losing weight and hair,
millions of memories
going swiftly away;
but despite all that
you are the same.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
onward,
T