it's him and i

my doppelganger is driving behind me.  same specs mirrored in the mirror.  and he's not watching hte road and what is he doing is he going to be safe and oh my god he almost hit that other car veered too far into the left lane and took a swerve back into the straight line running.  skipping through dotted lines and feeding off the black tar his car hums along at a speed that's no greater than mine and every turn i take he's there behind me.  what will happen when i stop when i park when i get out of my car?  where will he stop, where will he park, will he get out of his car too?  these are the things I wouldn't think about if I were you.  the bump pump of the break tapping to the ground and now gas pounding to run a hard boiled yellow light but the red comes down and doesn't cut him.  on two wheels he leans through the intersection no slower or faster no further behind. sunlight shields.
but i know it's him and i know it's him and i know he's me.
four turns to go and three turns later.  the first will be quick like a band aid rip to the right.
ten miles maybe four and we're careening to the left.  is he sitting beside me now?
no.  but eight blocks later it's another left and for a second I see through the specs and feel the blink of an eye as I almost slam into the crosswalk painted lines a barrier protecting crossers.
the engine idles as i slide into the drive.
the gas burns as i amble up the way.
and there is my parking space.
keep driving he whispers to me through his windshield, past the wipers, via the back window, around the headrest and into my ear.

dawning

and you thought that eight faces were hard to lead.  imagine the reflection of thousands and the knot in the middle.  the strings pull them in one or tow or three at a time.  conducting the ebb and flow of personalities in the temporal space of being.  and as i pull them in and pull on their masks I am thrown into the world and land splattered across the surface of things.  it would be a mistake to think, it would be an error to assume, it's goggles that I wear.  as if lenses alone could change the texture of care.  it perhaps is also incorrect to call them masks, but no body wants to step into an other's body completely.  we don't want to lose some sense that self isn't important enough to be a least partially permanent.  my legs and arms and core, flesh things that anchor me in space.  but the posture matches the mask, the movements are permeated by the face shaping and no mistake making I am always falling in and out from one to the other.  This is a tangled web I tread that's made of my own devices: contradiction and contingency.

the sideways man.

the sideways man.  looks at you straight on askew.  is always catching catching it peripherally.  speaks naturally out the corner of his mouth.  tries to look around reflections to freeze the world in two dimensions.  slips like a sheet of paper with weight through-dropped down.  but when he's alone he sucks in his cheeks to the bone and wonders whether the pain will leave his neck in public sees out of both eyes exhales out of both nostrils in an attempt to be skinny as possible and when he closes his eyes the negative afterimages come out of darkness and fly away.  it's hard to get help when you're standing at ninety degrees to all appearances.  you're not in line.  running counter would be much easier. to look your foes in the face as they stab your back.  to think against.  to be anti-easy as polar opposites.  the backwards looking man next in line.

the backwards looking man.

the backwards looking man.  falling down softly into a throw back of wasted time spent dizzy.  and the updraft of disappointment buoys and on the regretful, seen.  somewhere there are signs printed on skin and laughter that doesn't end.  listening in a straight line behind the path he least resisted.  and the stench of her perfume is killing flowers invading the cilia state.  stench hangs in midair too.  the future tapped him on the shoulder but only lower body turned eyes glued on eyes, thoughts zipped in an old army jacket.  how robotically we can all step forward on a moving sidewalk standing on the right letting others walk by pulling luggage.  and his future phone is a window to the past.  and forward thinking cannot escape the event horizon. his care is spaghetti strings.  but his frozen gaze was a mask that aligned sometimes with mine even though he did not blink.  i passed on into other phases, returning only when he seemed happier.

Aletheia Gone

Aletheia Gone
my personalities splayed out like water between my fingers the tighter that i tried to hold them together down low.
shattered glass reflecting each other's faces the slipped carelessly to the ground.
only now do I try to get them back to pull them together into a whole puddle that might fill a bowl.
the laughing sad sobbing of a throat that doesn't know if it wants to go up or down and the painful less-ness of crushing
nothing between fingers.  the ground soaks me up, the air dissipates and the water makes me featureless.
out here i am shape and form unfilled working harder and harder without a goal.
what happened to my questioning self? did I slip out first? poked the holes and lead the others through?
they leave me with a thirst to drink the ocean salt and for being-in-the-world

Because I want to see people and I want to see life

it was through the ear that the idea came to create and i looked you up and down and couldn't figure out what it was that was different about you.  but there she looked back at me and I couldn't believe it I was amazed.  this isn't the first time that we've thought the same thing at the same time unfortunately far apart from the way that we used to be.
I was a sailing ship's captain on lookout duty I spied it moving over the waves drawing ever closer and smiling with winks up and down below the waves up and down and up and down and below it disappeared but still could feel it rushing towards me and my small boat capsizing
alive.
these were the idiot sounds that i listened to going to an idiot's job.  i stood stupidly among the books wondering at their titles, feeling journals combined into volumes of years.  deaf hands fell on photocopied pages that someone else would eventually make sense of.  If only i stapled them the right way.
Those were also the days of dark boots on city streets, running to catch trains, threading my way through teachers and students.
the past is a metaphor-dead. but
luckily lifetimes were only years ago because we've moved on into the world of
refrigerator cleanouts and
friendly reminders.

this is how the draining of rain sounds

listen to a slow plodding sound.  footsteps on a pine needle forest floor.  sloe gin clouds fuzzing by, blurring the atmosphere with amorphous movement.  it was me pressing through the syrup of days, all dried out and looking. breathing steam rising up hairy.  taste the way that it moves like grass growing down your tongue and through your throat.  but this will never do.

Run. run through the next frame.  Plod no more as you search and search and let it go while your fingers blur and the toes can barely grip a thought before you're landing on the next.  there's a lightness that comes from moving this quickly like an outstripping of the thoughts that hold us down, a blur that others can't pin, a sound that's too loud to hear by those who think rationally.  running quickly and out of control we laugh down the hillside as the ground turns over our heads and the rocks and soil leave their mark on skin that's torn and ragged.  but even though our teeth fall out and our tongues dry up it doesn't matter as our spirit slips free from confinement.

it feels like chocolate chip cookies in here.
and my knee hitches.