Small Glass Habitat

There are no new ways of waking up, only new dreams to lurch out of. So I try going away.

So I try going for a walk but the do-gooders & their dogs all look at me the same.

I’m missing the part of the brain that makes one’s tail wag.

I go searching for it in the library’s green TEXTBOOK OF NEUROANATOMY (1995) but get lost in a sea of shrimp-pink folds.

I’m all folds.

I fold my excuse of a morning into a worse excuse of an afternoon. I schlep around like the animal I pretend I’m not.

Have you ever considered a squirrel’s breath? Or how we’ve stopped selling solutions, only escapes.

(Hello little white pill carefully trained by lab coats to swim to my amygdala.)

Let me dream of car washes on mars, suds spinning impossibly far—

On earth there’s no cure for 2 pm, the living room matinees in which you play mirror.

Blinding days, awake but bent. Batteries not included. (Batteries never included.)

Clouds swallow the hills of Providence but the red houses blush through, swimming with lives. Three crows paint themselves across sky.

I’m wary of people who are too kind.

There are two kinds of people, those whom emails find well, & those who cry at the zoo, watching a New Guinean Tree Kangaroo cling to its artificial branch of a life.

- Julian Ansorge