In this paradise of fugitive dust, there’s nothing
wrong. There will be years when the sky flattens
to a backdrop, a sound stage.
There will be years when you’ll swear your body
moves of its own volition, foreign to you as
another man’s watch. If you wake up in a bed
you don’t remember lying down in–
turn over, stand up.
In an unfamiliar mirror, you will see
your rubber face, limp as a garden hose.
I can’t tell you how to put yourself back
into yourself, but they say it can be done. For 500
days and nights, I was eggshelled, though other
people believed me to exist. They touched their hands
to me, their lips. I buttoned my shirts, water passed
into me, out of me. But all along I knew that this was
not me, that the world was not the world.
I saw a film
of grime on everything, a film for me alone.
Everything I touched was a falsehood.
I had to put that knowing somewhere.
I put it in a bottle, hid it in the body,
slid it between the pages of the book.
Now I know what not to say, what is not worth
insisting upon. In the office, I smile, participating,
the fluorescence adjusting my eyes.
*With thanks to Craig Santos Perez for the opening line borrowed from “Understory”
