An Apparition on the Way to the Protest
I saw you walking on the street today, on my way to the protest,
and I drove right past.
It was like spying and rebellion mixed with bitterness.
My eyes avoided the rearview mirror,
pending your disappearance.
Disappear-ance.
Dist-ance.
Your stance
dis-appears.
(Objects in mirror are closer than they appear)
How long will it be until you walk past me
and I don’t even see?
Once you pulled me from myself,
flooded my vision with color-pierced me,
changed the hue of my heart.
But now,
now I am lost in a landscape of blurring watercolors,
tripping up and down the back stairwells of phosphorescent, neon ochre.
A firefly smeared on the sidewalk.
Nights of vision.
Night vision.
Division.
How long will I stumble through these catacombs of unfamiliar portals to my past
squinting and sniffing for that one reminder:
the jasmine-scented beet root,
like a blood trail at a murder scene,
leading us from the place where we once prospered
into the dark unknown?
We gained consciousness in the light,
between the hydrangeas and the peonies
and the lotus that floats as if free,
but is tethered to an existence-
stranded on the other side.
And yet you’d say we have the power to shape our waking lives…
to drop to our knees, breathing in the rust and the rot of earth,
dipping our tongues to palmfuls of ruddy dirt for affirmation
like a cocaine addict testing the potency of his beloved.
You’d say,
We are here.
Now.
In the deep creases of living.
Yet, if this frosty breath of air, this ghost of my exhalation,
is a testament of being now awake, now alive-
then I yearn to go back to the place where my eyes no longer see
and the flowers forever breathe.
And I won’t be reminded that the man I just passed
is someone I used to know
with whom I sucked at the nectar of love-
but now is like vapor in the lingering winter night,
disappearing
in a gasp-
the same way he came to me.
and I drove right past.
It was like spying and rebellion mixed with bitterness.
My eyes avoided the rearview mirror,
pending your disappearance.
Disappear-ance.
Dist-ance.
Your stance
dis-appears.
(Objects in mirror are closer than they appear)
How long will it be until you walk past me
and I don’t even see?
Once you pulled me from myself,
flooded my vision with color-pierced me,
changed the hue of my heart.
But now,
now I am lost in a landscape of blurring watercolors,
tripping up and down the back stairwells of phosphorescent, neon ochre.
A firefly smeared on the sidewalk.
Nights of vision.
Night vision.
Division.
How long will I stumble through these catacombs of unfamiliar portals to my past
squinting and sniffing for that one reminder:
the jasmine-scented beet root,
like a blood trail at a murder scene,
leading us from the place where we once prospered
into the dark unknown?
We gained consciousness in the light,
between the hydrangeas and the peonies
and the lotus that floats as if free,
but is tethered to an existence-
stranded on the other side.
And yet you’d say we have the power to shape our waking lives…
to drop to our knees, breathing in the rust and the rot of earth,
dipping our tongues to palmfuls of ruddy dirt for affirmation
like a cocaine addict testing the potency of his beloved.
You’d say,
We are here.
Now.
In the deep creases of living.
Yet, if this frosty breath of air, this ghost of my exhalation,
is a testament of being now awake, now alive-
then I yearn to go back to the place where my eyes no longer see
and the flowers forever breathe.
And I won’t be reminded that the man I just passed
is someone I used to know
with whom I sucked at the nectar of love-
but now is like vapor in the lingering winter night,
disappearing
in a gasp-
the same way he came to me.