she twisted her ring finger & a jar opened & i found myself at a peruvian bazaar
selling rum drinks w/a twig in my hand, my name tag read "crayola" but when i
spoke it out loud it sounded something like "you have lived your years terrified
of beautiful ponies owned by dentists & know little of your second self." books
are like that, & even if you never actually owned a horse wouldn't it look at you
once & understand? stranded here in this cleared cloister of a world one thought
keeps me court & kin: i want to wake up & run my fingers through a cashmere
spock because there's only three ways to see. i catch myself speaking when no
one's around, i'm speaking in a language of hammers ringing like a set of inner
ear drums & examine the faces buried in the facets between the folds - i twist my
finger - back from the bottom i see a salesman at the top holding a pocket watch
& a bucket of birds. somewhere high in the andes they're stockpiling their stash
of those tiny umbrellas made from paper but w/out a map i'm just another tattoo
searching for a thigh to call home. yesterday my biggest concern was whether i
should make a doily out of our scraps of chicken wire or bend them into a shade
hat for my sunday walking & now here i am the judge in a high-stakes cook-off
of fried llama w/out the words needed to get me back to the boat. my ears! i'm
moulting! i wasn't built for such a sandpaper sun! if i took three steps back i'd
be two steps closer to understanding crayola after all, i'd be eating an apple next
to a bookcase waiting for a dentist to walk right through the wall, my last chance
at making the mountains fading into this reckoning over where it all went wrong.
-- Jeffrey Little
