Cubicle Love Notes
My back is to windows, but I catch
peripheray reflections, ghosts of the world
threatening to disappear when I look away,
running back in place when I look,
I know, I know.
In this cube I share, (the
dimensions are eerie,
something I don't want to name,
names are power, but you don't
know that or maybe you do,
your words are tools,
mine are birds or soil.)
memories are fragile things
out of my reach, effervescent and heavy,
quick and motionless, bubbles
frozen in midwinter air-
do you remember how they clung to the bricks?
I know, I try, I really do,
but this is not work,
this is a cage my mind paces
or else it atrophies, I don't know
which is worse.
So I study the turns of stars
and hold my
words to myself, parceling them out
like a prisoner remembers, like
zoo animals scent the air, like
strawberries in winter.
(You aren't real, most days, like
the world behind those windows.)
I try to find peace in the numbers,
in the stillness, the is-ness,
they are koans with corporate answers,
mandalas of profit,
I read the mala of the Man, and I try
to be at peace with this, with what I do,
I turn people into statistics and patterns,
I put them in boxes marked thief, incompetant,
rule breaker, profit loss. I remember,
I am redolent of summer, of learning,
of where I should be-
Atlantis is real, didn't you hear?
And so are these memories,
these blue petal thin walls we sleep behind,
the baby bird I buried in the backyard,
the bomber rusted out in a cornfield,
Sodom and Gomorra were real too, did you know?
We have the same chance as Lot's wife,
our chins held high like a hound scenting, or
a nod, we have no home but in
each other, in bubbles stuck to brick,
these are our wedding vows:
to grow from ashes,
to flow from sewage to the sea,
our hair flying out of car windows
as we run for the hills.