—EXCUSE ME, BUT CAN I BE YOU FOR A WHILE?

miasma

i took down

the scrolls

and every single cypher

rolled each

din and sin

into a single mat

shucked the bunch

over my shoulders

and tried to forget

about all that

but the morning

kept on

tugging on

my earlobes

trying to

tell me a secret

it had heard

about a man

from somewhere else

feeling sorry for himself

some fool who looked

an awful lot like me

so today i’m just

trying to find

a spit of

momentary slumber

for an evening i can’t

even recall

some dreams are so viscous

they weave themselves

into miasma

and you wake up

feeling like you’d be

better off dead

like this journal

i’ve started keeping

writing palsied rhymes

that only

make me weep

if i had a different mission

it might sand down my condition

but for now

i’ll just sell myself

for cheap

out on the

rippled clothesline

where that woman

used to hang

when she wasn’t busy

folding me

into a million

tiny squares