4:47 self-portraiture
Don’t mind me - I’m coveting a snail shell
to rest my sleeping, slug-slick face inside.
“Oh gross, oh good, oh right - and oh, goodnight,”
I say, poking around my red-rimmed eye,
“Can you tell my body’s really a cave?”
A blackbird breaks its beak on the window.
Heat-fried hair burns my neck, while the window
gleams. At dinner, we’ll crack an oyster shell
like we did as pilgrims to an empty cave -
all the bats dead, buried in muck inside.
Smelling dirt and diamonds, squinting our eyes,
waving down the dark, wishing it goodnight.
We drove home through the sky. It was a good night
spent winking at stars through the car window,
spotting miracles peering out of the moon’s eye.
Milkmaid braids crowning my head outside the Shell
station, I begged sticks of gum to melt inside
my mouth as the tall sky began to cave.
“Ever notice,” I ask, “‘Crave’ is almost ‘cave’?”
Existence ate me after you said goodnight,
I spent hours scrambling my insides.
Awakeness strains - forget the sleet-thick window,
and the cracks on a caged-chicken’s egg shell,
let me be unknown dust on a glass eye.
Oh darling, oh angel, look at my eyes.
I like you now, but once said I could not cave
in and let you steal my mind - I could not shell
out every inch of me just to hear goodnight.
“Besides,” I’d said, “I have plans - I’ve a window
To step through and cabinets to curl inside.”
Someone said bird bones are hollow inside,
light enough to slip straight towards a storm’s eye.
Bugs and rain splatter the same on car windows.
There’s pockets of held-breath air in undersea caves.
Lips always part odd ways to kiss goodnight.
Does an oyster care when you split its shell?
My insides are all blackbird bones and liquorice strings; my mouth a wet cave.
I’ll wander through the good night, slippery as a marble and shiny as a cat-eye.
See - I have no shell to peer into, just words that tilt like witch-windows.
