Prairie Octopus, Awake

The night’s turned everything to junipers shagged & spooked with cerulean chalk-fruit, weird berries whiffing of Martians in rut. I forget this isn’t my universe sometimes. Sometimes I think I was falling most of my life to land here, a lone skirl in the immaculate hush. In my world I waltzed with my ink-self, my black shantung. Owls swallow vowels in stilled trees. It’s not sleeplessness, it’s fear of what the dark will do if I don’t keep a close eye on it. Blue minutes leak from the pricked stars’ prisms, seep into the earth unchecked. Just as well— I’ve hardly enough arms to gather them.