Catatonia caresses the mind,
a convincing case for catharsis,
but it's just a record skipping.
Blink twice, be gone.
Think ice, abscond.

Time tears a hole in tender,
healing through turbidity,
but it's just a clock ticking.
Fast love, move slow.
Undone, low blow.

Vacant eyes, cold
Inside this heavy
Ribcage. Echoing caverns,
Useless pendulum
Steals what life you left ticking.

One step—
Take one step in another direction—
Forfeit reality.
Gaunt faces— bruised—
Specters, mere shadows—
Are you the skeleton?

They haunt you like ghosts;
Sheer days and translucent ways.
Your names are numbered,
And it's within the lucidity
That you find your sound—
Your chord in the gnomon.
But once the display fades,
Where will your colors remain?

I see stairs upon the reign.
Climb tiers, fake a smile— feign—
Or shall you at once descend
To such lofty depths,
The colors are squeezed from view—
Bleached and bone-new.
Life resembles desert,
And heat sticks you to the sand.
Lost, and what you can
Turns into notorious bland.

But your spine was a spiral staircase—
Climbed up and into your skull,
Felt the way your smile feels
Pulled across teeth.
Such mechanics anchor me
Towards a skyward ethereal pull.
This simplicity draws a line
From my chin to the sky.

And so between such mesmerizing sets
I sway
With no decision but to stay.

Sorrow soaks inside,
numbs all but the shell.

Now I feel like just a pair of eyes
[I'm not here]

Their presence taps on shoulders,
alerts us to a smile that's been gone awhile,
but now soothing and moving on—

have to believe that.

Bubbles break silence—
waiting, culminating, staying.
Unacknowledged promises,
but the maker knows they're made.

Stealing before the cold set in,
but guilt is a past tense
felt by those not so hollow—
not invisible.
Shapeless, so blend into the scenery.

It's strange how that works,
because it so obviously doesn't belong.
But continuity occurs through apathy—
turned on like a faucet.
[no consequences]

Towel dry, don't ask why—
more like how—
wash my hands of everything.

Clean and empty,
unseen and uncaring,
separate but indistinct,
invisible and vague;
an old memory—

but for her I will.