vague insinuating whispers
in the still of the frozen night
empty streets and the thrum of electricity
and the forlorn wind
kicking up the trash, skimming across the puddles
of stagnant ooze, sitting in the clogged sewer drains

visions of this city
peeled from my memory like onionskin
layer by layer
like pages off a tattered notebook

it isn’t so much whether I was really here
or whether all of it really happened

more like unwinding thread
substance surrendered stitch by stitch

the core of all matter
caught in such an infinitesimal space
(in the end we are all alone,
even our very atoms sit in a still pocket of bleak void
spinning in their lonely energy fields)

unwinding the heedless warp and woof
of time’s careening dance
the tangles and the knots
bearing lashed-together thorns and brambles
as time had spun careless upon the dry, dusty, desert soil
picking up all sorts of decaying matter
dead things caught in time’s trap
and the carrion beasts circle and wait

I will not look back not so much
because I am afraid of turning into a pillar of salt
like poor old Lot’s wife
but because there is no back
only the front side thrown through a wormhole
opening up in the mushy expanses of memory
gray matter like so much Jello
the insides of a can of Spam or corned beef

this goo is all that is real

And this sunshine that lights the misty valley
that peeks through the trees lining the crest of the hill
this dawn’s light to which the purple and white flowers turn
even dandelions and the reckless flowers of Jimson’s weed
bottled up in the untapped depths
(woven into my very being
enlaid in my very design)
bottled up in the wellsprings of my life’s blood
deep and yearning
like the molten nickel and iron swirling beneath our feet
the still slow creep of oozing lahar down the side of a blasted open crater
(it all oozes out in the end, grows cold, and still)

This sunshine is all I see when I close my eyes—
the bleak lightless days
the stonehearted, frozen days
like the lingering aftertaste of a nightmare
all bitter and full of fear
like vomit and bile splashed upon the ground
after a night of attempted suicide by slow poisonous death
these hopeless, heartless days
like some parodic horrorshow, squirming and shrinking in the sunlight
dessicated like the creepy crawly things that only live at night
—gone

so much like lucidity after psychotic hallucinations
when the mescaline and peyote, Ecstasy and LSD
streaming through your veins and caverns and cisterns
runs dry
only that acid taste that crawls out of your gut
and the ache from the hours of dry heaving

you wake up
it doesn’t matter where you are
much why you are or who you are
the relief of the ending night terrors
and the comforting solidity of what we call
—for lack of a better term—
real