Eyelit Rooms: Poems

Eyelit rooms: Poems 2020

Insomnia (where it begins)

The black of night creeps under closed eyelids

And caresses the lashes

A wash of Morpheus and Ambient

The night takes you hostage

Trapped behind the curtains of geo-rotation

A reverse vertigo sinks into the stomach

And nausea empties into the throat

Eyes flutter open and shut

Open and shut

Fireworks of the imagination dance across pupils

You might convince yourself were real

If not for the penetrating silence of their explosions

The mind flits from one hiding place to another

Incapable of escaping impossible dreams

Dreams of being awake, dreams of the wakeful

Leave no rest

No safe departure

Air pushes through toes

Air pushes through hair

Air pushes through tear ducts and unnamed orifices

Here and not here in the continuum of a folded up

Part of you tucked into itself

Love (for my husband)

You are a glass of warm milk on a sleepless night

A reverberating purr when skin meets skin

Two amber lights in the dark

Life cannot be lived without you

It starts and ends at your limits

That reach like tendrils of starlight

Entangled in my hair

Seeping through my pores

Suffused in a cocoon of your

Still life chaos that surrounds me

You are a heated hand pressed over cold ears

A blanket of arms in the pale early radiance

Two hammered copper disks

Where I see what I want to see

Or what you want to see in me

The unapproachable unknowing

Fuels a fool’s attempt at truth

Unnecessary in the uncertainty

For all is lost and all is found

In the midway fastening of light

Suicide (Scott)

I must wake

Fluorescent lights crash into daylight

A line of demarcation that severs in two

Me from you

A fiction before me dressed as in a dream

A fabrication of you in black and gray

I must wake

But not with you, not in black and gray

Not in the silence behind closed eyes

A shroud disturbed by perforations of light

Sliding from this side to the other

Moving in absolute stillness

I must wake

Standing alone I feel your

Insensate state invading my own

The hollowness of an unreturned gaze

Blinded to darkness by the unrelenting

Pummeling of light on light

Of light on black, of black on light

I must wake

Guilt (wanting more)

If this were all

It is too easily recast

Upon itself

Lonely in a multiverse of possibility

Too little to see with eyes turned inward

Too little to grasp with the heart

Once again, once again, once again more

A whorl of Mobius strips

Zoom to nowhere

A vacuum of time

In which the unlived is more real

Than what you hold in your eyes

Where fireworks splash in the dark

Unseen and unheard

A world unto itself

If this were all

It is too easily undone

A breath of yearning

Released from under the lid

Desperately forced back shut

The unknowns of possibility

Alarming in their threats

To take everything

Until all that remains

Is the unlived reality

Held in the eyes

Unseen and unheard

Consuming all comfort

In its voracity to subdue and supplant

And leave you with its loneliness

Vera Veritas (Pregnancy 20 weeks)

The pulse inside you

Quickens and throbs

Stretching you from the inside out

You lose control

Of your body

Of your mind

There is something foreign

About how your eyes

See themselves

Like they are not alone

Yet they are the same color as before

Time is interminable

And stretches on

And on on your skin

A guest in your own body

A voyeur to its functions

You call out

Inside of yourself

For a reprieve

To harness command

Over the forces in the

Recesses of the deepest

Part of what is you

What is not you

What is both

Inseparable yet distinct

In the dark

Yet able to see light

Do your eyelids

Flutter when mine do?

Fear (for the baby in a pandemic)
I am me

I am you

In the void of the stillness

All of creation is paused

And we are left to be we

In the back and forth, back and forth

Electricity circulating in one-two thumps

One-two thumps knock into one another

And tumble through the pale blue light

Swirling below, above, but not between

A breath on the skin

A mouth on the nipple

You are you

You are me

You began with me

I began before you

We began somewhere else

We began in the dark

We will leave in the dark

One with the other

The other with the one

We cease to be we in the dark

Fear and anxiety II

He holds me bound and stripped

Suffocation over my face with no hand

A growing darkness with the sunrise

A lolling of the tongue in a dry mouth

He holds my eyelids open

To behold how far I have fallen

To observe as he violently takes me

Sand fills my muscles and weighs me down

A scratching of fiber against fiber

As a cut wound down the insides

Pills?

What pills?

They taunt me from the sideboard

Dancing a jig round and round

He has conquered them too

There will be no rescue

A body as a mind trapped

I think therefore I am ?

I am, I am, I am just a body

I am, I am, I am just temporary

The universe was born of a single moment

That has gone on forever

This body goes on forever

In the light

Natural or artificial

Trapping my mind