By John Grey
1
A charge of “who am I?” –
no immunity in this court –
the hiatus between blood and nerve,
engaging in conversation,
an antigenic substance,
archaic, the porous,
when you put weight on it
it oozes sorrow –
he asks questions
as if seizing you by the throat –
his face haunts
like a camera with the ability
to form antibodies,
compressed and contracting –
whatever you mutter,
you cannot think of a better word,
don’t budge an inch
though your emotions will not hold together
and you keep spouting evidence
to which the past is attached like muscle,
brutally, embarrassingly, exquisitely specific –
you dare yourself
to extend toward beginning,
in a bid for the possessed.
to understand its own meaning –
it takes guts,
and antibodies
the wiles to escape a locked room
or beat back the mind’s intruders –
there is no real answer,
not world order, not good manners,
just a fear,
a magnified portrait,
a picture of yourself
that’s always being taken,
an old expression approaching from the south,
a trembling ardor,
all perceptions drained
from one person to another –
a potential explosion of one kind or another –
put an eye to the lens,
you feel stranded in your own renaissance,
2
the end of each thought
never an emphatic “no”,
just a glassy surface
and a reflection you can’t refuse,
shorn of its safety net,
in the kind of solitude
that’s oblivious to the one feeling it,
beginning with the fleshy parts,
ending up as successive sensations
suffering from too much breath,
a reaction between antibodies,
and dreams threatened from within –
with his probing,
no sensation is impartial,
everything transformed
into people and activities,
unsurpassed among
your voluntary and involuntary reactions.
© 2020 John Grey
Undivided Magazine 