the ingot of I;

“You’ll poke your eye out with this kind of keen observation.”

It’s always been like this. Features of the catapult are clear, clear, clear

to me when there’s no double vision and I’m not day drunk or hungover off

lust, cheap beer, or the feeling of a finger tracing over love’s decade-old stigmata.

The smart lovely one said something about entering the “rust mentality.”

She’s onto something that I feel in my own way, because I myself seem to have

oxidized fully, and especially since last year when I was pulled out of an ambulance

and spent three days learning to cope with how I operate on Ativan.

Thought I would die then. Didn’t. Great.

I couldn’t imagine dying like this. In this. As this.

Out of all the places and people I could be, I’m on this isle of pole barns 40-feet tall,

everyone’s teeth rotted out from fruit sugars and state fair food;

bird box filled with rat poison AKA this sector of the Midwest.

I let this place slow-feed me sadness.

At least I caught up on sleep in the hospital.

I drove past a cemetery.

The men putting up those headstones might as well be osteoblasts building bones for our memory

(bone for bone, constructing secrets of sleep).

It’s no secret that I should leave here and find a purpose that isn’t limited by a lack

of tunnels toward reason.

This isn’t as bad as it could be, certainly, but it’s the worst that I’ve had the displeasure of

understanding in my own way.

Until I master whatever this is, I guess I’ll just keep writing about how unclear it all is.

I can’t forget I left a signature on the dotted line of life’s stupid contract.