Slipping

I can feel myself slipping into

Poetry because I’m slipping more and more of my

Bludgeoned days into the drawers of poems

Drawn from myself out of nothing between

Emailing and list-calling and cell-filling and during

Sleepless nights scanning the sheep-less

Fields of my memories excavating the buried scraps

All buzzed with insomnolent abstraction

Before finally sinking into dreams spiked

With fuzzy faces from wrenching places

Long since abandoned. Nothing comes true

Quite like ‘Your alarm will go off

In 5 hours and 37 minutes.’

…

Like morning mocha, words brew; the black tide rises

Before it decants, to glaze lethargy with twanging wakefulness.

Daze out the kitchen window towards cold Autumn sun.

…

My phone rings for the third time this

Minute and I almost throw a fist but instead

Press Alt-Tab and steal some time with a figurative

Smirk. VPN has crashed – what can I do?

Replacing a spreadsheet with a fresh one,

I begin talking to myself and now

You’re someone else’s. A knock at the door

Leads into some room that’s far from the biggest

You’ve ever seen, but to make up for that

The lights are well-spread and a sizable

Mirror has been placed near one of them.

Move to the worn chair, made to fit in.

Under an adjacent lit lamp there’s a notebook,

Its pages soggy with embarrassment but now

Dried enough to be legible: here we may be

Special. Detect a tapping of keys

And look to the corner: there’s a young

One eking out tweets for you know who.

And I’m afraid that’s all we have time for.