Consciousness

How it is fickle, leaving one alone to wander the halls of the skull with the fluorescents softly flickering. It rests on the head like a bird nest, woven of twigs and tinsel and awkward as soon as one stops to look. That pile of fallen leaves drifting from the brain to the fingertip burned on the stove, to the grooves in that man’s voice as he coos to his dog, blowing into the leaves of books with moonlit opossums and Chevrolets easing down the roads of one’s bones. And now it plucks a single tulip from the pixelated blizzard: yet itself is a swarm, a pulse with no indigenous form, the brain’s lunar halo. Our compacted galaxy, its constellations trembling like flies caught in a spider web, until we die, and then the flies buzz away—while another accidental coherence counts to three to pass the time or notes the berries on the bittersweet vine strewn in the spruces, red pebbles dropped in the brain’s gray pool. How it folds itself like a map to fit in a pocket, how it unfolds a fraying map from the pocket of the day.