A syllabic poem: nine and nine and nine and, on occasion, two. ♥ EAB
Nine Days from Now
He’s you with a cubist hand applied
to your features, someone I’d only
notice because of the split nature
of this unintended moment. I’d
expected to greet your laughter at
the boundaries of my right side, but
I met my distracted reflection
in the intermittent blackness of
the train window as it screamed through the
pathways that would never lead me home.
I’m transfixed by this resculpted you.
He brings me comfort in this lonely
moment. I curse the occasional
obstructions of tired passengers
and all the heavy mementos of
their day.
It’s all wrong:
the smell of the ripening lime trees,
the sparkling, misshapen crown of the
Pleiades—the intuition of
lonely moments seizes under the
unfortunate subjectivity
of our calendars in a conflict.
I stand
at the precipice of decision
with the sharp blade of my good judgment
blunted by the collision of the
unknown striking against the starker
limitations of this circumstance.
My suppositions are fixated
upon a wishful overlap of
time that cannot occur here, where I’m
consoled by a copy’s copy with
opaque facets that vanish when his
eyes meet mine. See, I find his triple-
dimensionality as unreal
as the nine days that separated
the fraying need of your decisions
from mine.