QUANTUM STATE OF THE CONFLICT DIAMOND
STILL THROWING FIRE FROM THE PAGES OF YOUR NOTEBOOKS 1
At the harbor, in the smallest hour of this (Death stuff for sure), this softly tendered now, the Youngest Day, this silvery clarion blast: I have no distance. Free flow if you can through your very own little reckoning: 10 yrs. ago today, as of this attosecond: this area is not me. For I am sick unto death of your single deranged sense, so much light leaking away @2 minutes_ to_ midnight, that I feel outside my body just before the factory steam whistle has blasted all 3 of us away. As of that blooming, 2 minutes from here, 10 years away, you’re my only witness. & I’m yours, seconds from this drowned quantum (I feel fragmented) in which we’ve been entangled for years, seconds, days ago, forever. All I did was sink into my own brain which sucks the orange pregnant moonlight out of our wept corners, body inanimate, damp, dead— continue to bleed us into these saturated rooms. For I feel foreclosed. I feel you collapsed on the quiver, on the dive, on the sink. I feel edited but I don’t have the access code. For you tug at my trigger-finger just so. For the second shift of bodies has been long underway . . .
1 It’s Sunday night, Feb. 12, 1994 It’s been zero degrees all weekend. I’ve been having a lot of strange fantasies about buying a .38 special at a pawn shop. I’ll cut out the middle of some secret old book where it can be hidden.
Copyright © 2018 by Sam Witt. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on June 6, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.