Question
A permission gate opens
narrower than the light
that seeps through an egg crack.
Permission to do or undo.
Everyone asleep
is the best time to wander
through a field marked by question.
*
Benjamin, night crept into my brain
with strange and pregnant interrogations
and I wonder if you’ve known the same
phenomenon. Those sinewy askings
that go on
and on.
*
Did Dante notice the thousand crossed twigs
along the path
or was he blind with vision?
Shakespeare cry over Lear
upon waking from his own
love-failed nightmare?
(I feel like a man in the guts
of a machine made of vibrating string,
chords of why.)
*
Light seeks no permission
to pour through glass of stain
or wave away in dots for half the day.
What, Benjamin, when darkness comes
with its agenda of do and undo
does night ask of you?
Answer
Glass looks better broken, anyway.
Pops, sometimes I sit soaked in a vat of ink –
that’s when the irises feel the most irrelevant.
Night creeps like it doesn’t want to wake me,
and just sits softly on my brain.
Seeps in through the roots of my canals
and (almost shyly) questions.
“I guess,” I chant (to it and her and even you sometimes).
I’ve got maybe one guess for those sinewy askings that go on,
those oil rivers flooding through the shattered windows of my room –
reactants.
See pops, I learned in chemistry that energy isn’t given
to the cosmos when bonds are broken,
but when they’re formed.
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