Monologue

I am reduced to grammar.
I have no feeling but in expression,
giving name to the throe and thrum
of what I cannot instinctively name—
yet what can be named as instinct
but the thrum and throe of feeling
we train ourselves to?
What can I do but submit
to language?

I narrate.
It is a fever, this quotidian spasm to define,
voice and phonate this pulse
pyretic for an audience:
monologue from soliloquy.

I am nothing but subjected clauses,
convulsing experience into phrases;
yes, I have put my whole life to words.
But allow me to share some with you.

Skyward

It is too much to hope for
that it does not rain
on the way home.
On the bus
my glasses condense,
humidity and exhaustion.
The yellow streetlight curls coyly
around the handle bars;
and then it bounds
and bounds.
My glasses clear,
bespeckled by the drizzle,
in these streets lean with wet.
The light here is starker,
more desperate
and soon my shirt grows too damp
to wipe clear my lenses.

We change merely the semblances of routine.

I used to walk through the rain, head down,
a hunched invisibility.
I kept my glasses dry;
I found meaning in only
the ground before me.

Where did that boy go?
When did I learn to look up?

—Is that true?

Is it true that I have been perhaps been inconstant
in the diary of my regrets,
is it true I have been directed to skies and possibility,
to that grey blur fathomless and forever
I can barely see
and that I have learned to stand up straight in the rain—

Change is slow and it is killing.
I have both life and a hunger for it.

It is perhaps true, that small shadow of my old soul
does make his way away from me,
through the sated streets of home no longer mine,
slouching towards that end.