Black Mirror

Then there are these days the black light seeps
under the liminal space between floor
and door
and my mind turns to marshland
where thought after thought tries to escape
being swamped (now treading light as a bird testing water
now skipping softly like a stone); somehow
trying to evade
the slinking
black
quagmire
that will
bog them down

for
eternity.


(my eyes have grown irreversibly wide
from watching the foot kept wrong swift-slipping
the last hand sinking in the slough, white spider)
and now that they've grown three feet wider
I find my lids can't close
and so I cannot shut my eyes to sleep

I'd like to write in prisms,
talk benignly of my pain; propel
grandiose notions of my martyred self
my bleeding hands and wounds, my
own crown of thorns
but self-pity is a form of narcissism too,
my child, gazing
love-struck into the mirror of
your own suffering-