NEUROLOGICAL THEORIES OF DENIAL

Heat seeps to sprinkle
My forehead with sweat just as every
Morning we return to the cold

Liberty of distance, droves
Of the enchanted exchanging
Lives, I will build

A strange child to reckon
With such horror and cause
It to seek absences

To stare at truth like a gleaming
Toxicity translated by
Breezes and it will glean

Also the private conspiracy
One makes with
Oneself, for if we are

One with explosion
It is combinatorial, the ice
Cream man’s melodic

Transience merging with the human
Traffic as bodies perpetuate
Their chemical escapade, ardently reveling

In the catalog of soft
Abstractions, when you are gone I listen
To The Transfiguration and am lost

In the cloud your body
Becomes, I mean
The one you possess

That which possesses me
In the eerie stereo darkness
And if grammar

Is the direct result of how
Humans feel in the world, perhaps
The obverse is also

True, adverbs make me who
It is I can be said
To have been, I can practically

Hear all those words out
There amassing to make the journey
Inward, blistering

Pings and haunted whooshes
Triangulating at the self’s too
Permeable periphery

As if it were no
Surprise to suddenly dissolve
Into a tome-like tomb

Of syllabic feedback, the poems
That these days
Have become more

Real than the indentations
On my mattress or
An unwashed cutting

Board, this cigarette in the empty
Beer can atmospherically
Sizzling to its obscure close

On the streetside sill, so
It is that a man
Marvels at the tumult

Or ease he’s
Become, balancing the neurological
Theories of denial

With the fact that the heart is
Beautiful as a seismograph
That if I dare to look a stranger

In the eye his palms
Will swell, that it is suicide to live
Conscientiously among

The compromising throng.