A Backwards Dance

A tepid glance from across the bar
draws me in; I block it out
willingly, instinctually.

There's no need for conversation,
our eyes met and told our story
like playing a record backwards.

Tracks that skip and moan
at different intervals
reciting an untuned melody

which somehow managed to force
the needle in such obtuse
measure to play the tune correctly.

It's strange to say, for me,
when two hearts align,
it could be for the better.

Yet I am reluctant to wind
the phonograph any farther,
lest I be responsible for the dance.

The Lens of Life

I'm speaking through a lens, looking through a lens - it's how I picture the world—through a lens.  My Grandmother claims when she sits on the side of the dinner table facing the patio doorway she cannot see the person sitting across from her.  She has cataracts and describes it as though looking at a silhouette with fog in between.  I reconcile this to driving down a dark and winding road at night where the fog dances in the trough of curves and oncoming headlights mask traffic into black boxcars passing by.  I see this through the lens of my eyes - without cataract but with fog just the same.  Sight - an obligatory sensory phenomena that I obtain and hers wanes, like my hearing—completely deaf in the right ear, as the lenses of her eyes are laden with steam.  These sights and sounds, all heard and seen through a lens - a lens of life:  the lens that captures thought and emotion in a time and place.  I once took a photograph of a lamp post with the words "Trust Jesus" painted white with a drunk hand and in the background was an accident with police, fire, and rescue services—I thought: how ironic.  Just a time, and a place, and a scene, and my lens, leading to a thought, a feeling, the sight, the sounds, all captured on a tiny piece of film, a silent shock to my hippocampus slowly forming a permanent neural connection that will indefinitely affect me in some way, shape, or form, for the rest of my existence.  These shocks, however severe and reoccurring, wiggle themselves through the prefrontal cortex, changing us, shaping us, into some being, some identity that we consider a "soul", guiding us, preconceiving our judgments and our actions, never without a second thought—it would be unwise to test the limits of the human brain, hitherto, it may lash back at us in force:  in psychological impairment, mood or multiple personality disorder—schizophrenia.  To label us "damaged"; to throw us into the lion's den to be tested and broken—at best given one last chance to retain that one singular piece of humanity we were able to hold onto until the end.

Shades of Gray

All I am is cold,

cold as the curve
of granite formed of a face
from forgotten times,
dead in the chill of winter.

Lost in a darkness
of dancing diamonds
beneath a blanket to sheathe
the surface of a testament
to a time of surrender.

Deprived of thought,
viscerated to feel numb
rather than blinded,
I see all shades of gray
in the shadows of my statue.