Post-Traumatic Rainstorm

Cinder blocks ripple. A hard lot is suddenly glammed up by an illusion. Cats will slip under chain-link and lap this dirty pool. I want to go there, be gone there, be anything liquid or even topped with barbed tape. But the sky is swept away and I am stuck in a parked car, all limbs attached to the idea of being human. As if sketched by da Vinci. As if stretched across a piece of parchment, I am drawn. Fear circles flesh boxed in by so many tawdry corners: disease, grocery lists, and suchnot. Even my thighs face Vitruvian quandaries: whether to stay together or fall apart. The mental ward is not unappealing: I check my calendar. What’s a lesion in the temporal lobe except an opportunity for time to fall into a black hole? These are clinical terms, time and black hole, words even this century’s doctors will recognize as problematic: both should help me forget but don’t. Heal, deaden. Either way I am a woman who wants to be rid of memory, past and future. Today I desire nothing more than to sit stilled. What’s so rotten about this willing suspension of all inclinations to engage anything other than stasis, brow furrowed, body puddled, hollow? Earlier, I watched a shiny black millipede on turned dirt make progress that could be measured in inches. Perhaps the art of letters is as insubstantial, as oddly disconcerting, and as unwavering. Nothing can be mistaken for resolution, yet the allure of metamorphosis, the way hard things buckle under the line, ameliorates something, at least encourages the generalized slurry of bad thinking to flow into the next available trough. Slop has purpose. This much I know.