Three a.m. mind-skin ripped
Open—
Reek of over-ripened moon
Inversion of truth—

Dimensionless black mouths
Materializing
In the rippling gauze
Of a lost bed in a lost room—
Horrid taste
Of eternal resurfacings—

A ferocious silence
Forces its tap root up through
Physics' false floor
Up heaving
Tons of old, used-up starlight—

She lies there in some kind
Of sleep
An alien presence
Under disintegrating sheets,
Her once familiar skin
Perhaps only the thin wrapping
Of an empty core—

Shuttering in my private void
I wait
Unredeemed
For the anesthetic of daylight

I have no patience for your fairy tales
Bogus wormholes
Supposed exits or invented terrors that lie beyond
Plain common sense—
You feel it, you insist,
Some omniscient eye
Haunting our humble passage.

The sky expands, the trees push a deft breeze out—
My skin a thin veneer
Dissolving
This life -- such evasive bits of twirling colored light
My reason melting just enough
I eat the hum of bees, the rattle of dragonfly wings
The thick slice of untampered sun—

The spider in its tapestry
Reads the changes
I lack the sense to digest—

A distant voice resurrects
This jagged, piecemeal world
Into expedient forms—
Parcels of tolerable truth
Oases of salvation
Sinkholes of silent hope,

I trace the hard won lines
Of her trusting face,
The memories suffered and embraced
Of love's story,
Her beguiling transformations
Skimming like swallows past my heart—
Mere transitory scintillations
Of the soft immaterial centre
I cannot hold.