last night's things

last night I was a little duet with the cancer of silence

last night I was an invalid, the fog between my bed and desk

last night I was haunted, a refugee in a foreign hospital

last night I was on trial, the court a sculpture garden

last night I was an astronaut, a body in sterile space

last night I was a poisoned philosopher, an abeyance

of calender signs

last night I was a cimmerian skeleton with seven names

last night I was an omen eater, but found indigestible grains

last night I was an abominable snowman, I just could not see

last night I was stigma, a socket without twilight

last night I was several centuries of veiled stamina

last night I was a historian, pinching the vestiges

of a one-time valentine

last night I was an exorcism, and I forgot myself

last night I was a tsunami of hurt, conscience and uncertainty

last night I was twisting, twisting in that supernatural loss

last night I was a failed outpost, a dismantled plane

last night I was hypnotized, a hell of prayers

last night I was a desperate blanket, wanting nothingness

badly enough to cause it

tonight's things

tonight I am terminal, sympathy gone furious, an ordinary shadow

tonight I am nobody, the antibody, everybody; I am the zoo that is not you

tonight I am seven, five, and three elephants remembering their forced trip off the plains

tonight I am bronzed fingers counting off the irreversible

tonight I am camouflage's son, a bouquet of broken half-lives

tonight I am a series of transplants, mixed oblivions

and crossed-out apologies

tonight I am open foreground, a statue of crumbs, pennies and negations

tonight I am nervous confetti, six waking forecasts hoping for a seventh

tonight I am haywire jade, a frozen crucible too proud to work

tonight I am the cold side of the bed, intermediate territory

tonight I am captive fingerprinting, malignant reflections

tonight I am the dead shrine in my shoulder, the phase before

the phoenix phase

tonight I am a capsule of emptiness, anxiety's violent burlesque

tonight I am a hammered out kaleidescope, a handful of lost color

tonight I am the opening and closing of my best and worst museum

tonight I am immanent, a ghost letter, a stolen cemetery flower

tonight I am my own haunting, an outpost with no medicine

tonight I am sped-up quicksand, the raging of a certain animal truth

tonight I am the most vulnerable translation on earth

colette jonopulos

drew kalbach