It's a tale of two weeks.
I kissed the men's room wall when I returned,
Grateful to excess we all still got along.
Now I am a narcissist at large
For not reading the dream room cooly enough
As the tedium society calibrated vectors of wind
Outside the iron tower spoken of as gold
As they do every day.
No one is who
I thought they were. They act independently
Of my motives, for their actions,
Though the kiss is real enough.
What is in front of me
Is enough to throw completely
In the mold of myself, that missing commodity,
An intrusion of self that beckons the light
To an already luminous building.
So crystalline
The way we are stilled sometimes, as if we
Have found shape, and need to orbit away
From the confinement.
But the tighter the box
The more content the smile, the better to know
What freedom is by its lack, and because
That is exactly what has been asked of it.
The rich recompense
For the way you accept no hope, no choice,
No voice, just blocks of time to sweat out nothing.
In the breakroom exchange
Are positioned faces and names,
As if they know something
Worth extracting — as if they count,
And they do, because they don't
And know it, how low they've been willing to go
To get so high.
