It had been too long.
So long that the script
I swallowed and rolled up
molded inside.
Fear doesn’t save us.
Fear is the very thing that keeps us
at a dangerous distance
from the thing we want to change.
It can grab us by the ankles,
and pull us into obsidian.
The ineffable sense that things
have gone unstuck.
It wasn’t your fault — it wasn’t you
that got cold in January.
It wasn’t you that rained.
It wasn’t your fault you left your body when
it was doing everything it was supposed to do.
I remember it as a fractured,
funhouse-night
with trap doors.
I play the reel back in my eyes.
Then, from the corner of the room, I
lift up a coffee mug from the table, as a lucid reminder,
we still live in our memories.
This happened to me, but it isn’t me.
There’s finally freedom when you see the set, as a set —
it’s always smaller than you remember,
watching from the audience, 5th-row center.