.................................
Labyrinthine Days, Starry Nights
.................................

My brain is building a fence today, a black picket, the future leaping
like rabbits between every other crack. The good side turned in, of
course, we want the comfort of ruining our neighbors' view. When I
was drunk in those positions even the stars had to ask permission to
wander my yard. Or else I just fell asleep to the task of breathing
in and out an entire night. This morning your mouth moved with your
breath, a fluctuation between O and oval. The slow, red flap of a
jellyfish, moments peeling out from themselves, shedding replacing
skin.

You resemble nothing so much as the vowel of wind.

Here is how I would tell you: sleet is falling along a thin, dirt
road, a mere streak among the trees. A lake fills with stars,
serpents glide coolly past my ankles. You are lying awake, imagining
all I might be, all the while wanting to sleep. Go ahead. I'll watch
you all morning. Eventually, time passes into this time and again.
Your eyes might look up and say "O!" Twice.

 
.................................
Sequential
.................................

The wolfmen, all ten of them,
are chasing you once more
toward the Texas border.

It might be hours
before mother pries you
from the snarl of furry clutches,

years before you resume
late-night television privileges, decades
before you gingerly steer a car

across the dusty panhandle,
inhaling the nightmare only a chronic
gathering of cattle can invoke.

As prayers fall whispering into sleep--
a hole lovingly leapt into each night,
a pure darkness, the kind

that breeds blind, albino crickets
amid silence--the curtains part,
the screen grows hairy. Gravity

suddenly quits and all around
patrons zing like meteorites
into the domed ceiling, a vicious sky

rejecting each star.

.................................
Marck L. Beggs
.................................

 
Copyright © Marck L. Beggs
November 1997

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Copyright © 1997 A Small Garlic Press. All rights reserved.
Created 1997/6/3. Updated last on 2000/7/17.