You add and subtract
the numbers in your ledger,
and they will not sum.
So you reach again for your pencil
and erase it all.
Somewhere between night and day you believe the high was real, and this trick of light still draws its fantasies, promising a recipe for making bread without yeast. Carbon dioxide, mistaken for muddied hope. Red spaces. Clotted voices. Where were you during this negligent math? And why does erasure seem impossible?
There were seven stairs,
but unknown to you,
there were six.
You trip and fall into a knot
with no mercy to untie it.
But now you know.
Stepping invisibly. Exchanging kill methods. Fire-breathing. What will you do now? Orwell’s elephant, a passing dilemma. A lapse, in body and in mind, and she is allowed to govern your body for a week. Ashes left. Single digits. Return. She only needed you to listen.
You hold a plate
made in China
two hundred years ago.
You drop it,
and it breaks into pieces
that cannot be glued.
So you find a replacement
and return it, unceremoniously.
With your hand upon your heart, you say, I know. It hurts. You’re not broken. It all compounded, culminated, clarified. No way now but to redo the math. But where in your heart do you keep these regrets? How does oblivion hold now? No longer opaque, you may see your way through it all again. Keep them in fields of lavender until you are ready to be taught again.
About the Creator
Paul Aaron Domenick
I write to break the psyche in half. What good are words unless they turn us upside down and shake us?
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