Reckoning with the Truths of
My Falsehood

In the shower, inundated with the business of living,
I am in love with
the idea of myself crying.
A discordant voice, buoyant in the falling
water, is interrupted by advertisements selling me
relief from advertisements.
Everyone is trying to sell me something.
The night spins a boardroom of salesmen like wool—
they pitch me an alternate route to myself.
& I dry myself. & I decline.

***

Stepping out, I feel
the weight of angels on my shoulders most
keenly, their lustrous frames, pearlescent whiskers
against my body.
They will account for my deeds in the world after this world,
light up each time the brief field of my forehead
grazes the earth. My hands, eyes, will testify—

Yes, I have been harsh to this banner
announcing me with a lisp,

banner I wash daily with a mass of water
first secured in prayer hands and then:

Drained,
Into the swamp down the road
Where atonement lives,

And where I don’t.

No, beauty was never an escape.
Yes, yes, it was a tether.

***

A needle, poised in a hand.
A clutter, perforated, staked
on a singular point.

Blood, singeing in its tomb.
But the tomb is all I have,
can hope to have.

The air around it cracks with
thunderbolt certainty.

The mind swells to a threshold beyond which
death is a character in a
Russian novel that
disappears for a few hundred pages until
the plot stretches itself
bare.

***

All I know is not in front of me, my sweet angels.
It is not behind.
It is here; this.