It’s not the handstand of vision
bombastically tuning overworked retinas
but the fluidity of associations –
how the pupil learns to cartwheel
in response to fearful stimuli, its muscles
pulsing outwards in in A major
while the heart shrieks back into the womb.
It’s about sympathetic input and survival,
a sensory balance instead of eradication.
Living the perception instead of mastery.
Partnership. I’m Pavlovian to orange,
learning to pluck nerves in a violet range.
I hang my thoughts along the curves of a porcelain mug:
diced them into little bullets on a battered cutting board,
dunked them in a lukewarm blend of honey and earl grey.
Tea is liquid calm, cooking is therapeutic, so this should suffice,
I mutter, fragrant thunderheads boiled to life by flashing teaspoons.
They are thirsty and bitter, sliced like a shedding autumn
and swirling leaves in a tumultuous universe. As such,
I gorge on their anger and transfer my matter using heat –
suddenly, we are a flustered universe trying to expand
in a concord skull the size of a grape. I tell them melting is
reincarnation – they use cyclical, fatalistic, cannibalistic.
I just sprinkle fine medicine in the brew and call it a night.
Bring the rulers made of pungent plastic and fluorescent dyes.
Hang the neon signs – I want a purple so artificial
that it mimics the glory of god – brightness
so impossible I could replace my retinas
with the walls. Demarcate the corners –
89 degree angles jutting into the eyes.
I’ve built a doghouse for tomorrow before
but the future is something new. Something
shiny and mechanical, and I’ve spent all
of today computing its width. Determined
its waist with a tape measure, replaced dates
with inches on the calendar. I’ve sent our
dress size to the seamstress. Customized
the cut – the color – the length of its train
grazing the grass as it enters our home.
It will be perfect, and it will be beautiful.
But the globe churns. Tectonics shift
and the sun changes its course.
The level tilts on the roof. This will all be fine.
The shingles fall. Stucco walls crack
and the vibrance erodes. Our tailor
quits so I question our vision.
Instead of a parietal lobe, a sickly bubble
gurgles our dimensions in a voice
only protons could record. Something is off.
Something is off – something is off – something
I’m learning to digest the air with my arms,
installing new mouths in my palms with amber clay.
They tremble like fossilized mosquitoes and chirp in unrequited
blood – please – I’ll recombine my own atmosphere
into a pterodactyl’s dessicated egg:
instead, there’s a half-baked gizzard slipping from my hand
and I’m so damn tired.
There’s a pyre of calendars burning in the pillows.
Smoke billows to the ceiling in the color of overused pencils.
I’ve become a pious woman and summoned priests
when I mistook scales and grades for the devil.
They sound so small when they ricochet off the headboard
Eat more spinach
Their bouncing tracks knit opaque webs across the room.
I vomit cotton candy after a final tilt-a-whirl trip.
Our throats become papery and green after a while.
Another pen snaps as the chest accordions
and words collapse against each other like dominoes.
Where’s your sense of creativity?
The journal lies agape.
The document starves. It’s been hours since the last edit.
Don’t you want to get paid this month?
It takes three weeks to break a bad habit
but only one more misstep
before my molars fall out, start collecting in the rain catchers
on the linoleum floors of the amygdala during the night
Drink more water
and I’m walking naked through the limbic system.
Don’t bite your nails.
The hippocampus spits out half-digested doves,
their bones clattering down vertebrae
like broken Slinkies.
Just take your calcium
and get back to work.
Why aren’t you meditating anymore?, he asked, the hypertension
pills sliding down his throat like lightning bugs in a foggy jar.
I gulp in stars. I’m just too distracted, I replied. Because I’m busy.
Because notes flit across these cluttered desks like dragonflies.
Because nests of articles possess my screens with a guttural clatter.
Because the fireflies might not be covered by insurance.
Because I choose to swallow myself instead of a careful digestion,
spitting little pieces to the world in the fashion of a gumball machine.
Alight, he asked me why I started in the first place. Mouth full of lies
and quick wings, I rehearse my answer. I just wanted the noise to go away.
There was a blue man outside my room today.
He prowled the rooftops with shovels for limbs
and an excess of tombstones strapped to his chest.
He frowned at my window with gelatinous dimples.
Had lost his features as though they melted off his face.
In response, I pasted giant googly eyes to his forehead
and hid the crinkled receipt from his new gaze
as one would a proper gift. Asked him how he felt.
Suddenly, he was more green. Cerulean, as if he
had swirled a bit of the cosmos in his molded flesh.
He told me he wanted to plant a forest tonight.
His saplings were strewn out to dry in a damp prism
of emerald. Wondered if he could tuck into
their asthmatic shadows like patchwork
of laughing darkness. Already removed his eyes
so they couldn’t show him the dawning world
as the sun blew away his warmth from their stems.
He’d wanted to hide, he said. I’d thought otherwise.
I wove cornea from the psalms of mourning doves
and hooked them into the rumbling, convex plastic
coating his new vision. He was a sickly gold, now,
splayed on the glass like a star before a black hole.
Said he knew I’d kill him today. Suck the evening
sky out of his skull like unnecessary trephination.
You all do. Doesn’t matter, I’d decided. He would die
without the lobotomy, anyway. Well, something of him
would. I chiseled his lunar name into another tombstone
and placed it in his stretched knapsack. Plunged the pick
beneath his jittery pupils and began our work.
Watched the world spill greedily out of him. His chest
concave. We’re always devoured by stars, regardless.
Felt his head go cold as the ground turned orange.
The exciting adventures of Toby the Wonderdog
Dinosaur Museum Reviews!
A wee bit o' poetry with a touch of the sciences.
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