BORN IN A DOORWAY

like a long, loose, lucid dream, the kind that disappears from the mind in an instant, in the morning sun,

over a cup of hot steamy Sumatra, between flicks of cigarette ash, in the exact moment of realization that that which is made

inevitably fails,

the attempt to remember the events, it was like their dissolution and their fade into insignificance;


like the subtle and instantaneous shivers felt in moments something is perfectly stated and said,

said even with the knowledge that truth does not exist and is mostly dead,

it was like the humbling assurance in its quiet breath, within reverberations of its precise utterance

and in the simplicity of it simply being said;


like the warm and muggy sweat produced by two nervous hands held together in a shed, among cold corn and dead bodies rotting in a field, like an insane laugh coming from a little girl huddled in fear,

like the brief wind produced by two gasps, shaking up dust from the windowsills, from all the would-be artifacts,

it was like the nervous tap of his foot, the hollow sound of wooden floor before the blast;

like watching marshmallows melt into hot chocolate or the harmony of crickets at dusk, the sound of fingernails tapping wood,

the way a tack moves into drywall as it is pushed in or the salty ocean and the way its air sticks to the skin,

like dewdrops on a spider-web

like writing a poem, reading it later, not knowing what was just written, what it all means or what it meant,

but feeling it is beautiful, anyway;


like dead leaves falling in the fall,

the first time i saw her it was like all that
but not like that,

at all.