The Room Begins Again

Almost spoken. Intimate, dry, with a faint smile of intellectual disbelief.

I caught a thought undressing in the hallway of my head,

It wore the face of something I had never quite said.

I asked it for a reason. It requested better light.

Then sold me back my silence at an existential price.

There's a little mathematician counting raindrops in my skin,

While a Buddha made of cigarette smoke asks who let the weather in.

And I keep finding tiny doors where ordinary words have been,

But every time I open one, the room begins again.

Spoken, wandering, the piano answering in crooked steps

Hm. Alright then.

The room begins again and I am standing in the middle of a theorem

that refuses to be proven

because the proof keeps asking me questions

about my posture

and I have never been good at standing.

Deliberate, faint metallic resonance of sarcasm

So naturally I sit.

A man sits.

A dignified man sits with tremendous dignity.

The trumpet agrees.

The trumpet always agrees with dignity.

That is why I distrust it.

Muttered, trailing into a whisper

Where was I

Something about the spoon

The spoon on the glass like a tiny appointment

with nothing to attend

and yet I attend

Barely sung, wounded warmth, instruments thinning out

There is a tenderness in arithmetic

I have never told anyone

The way numbers hold each other without ever saying why

The way two and two

sit quietly

and never once explain themselves

Quiet laugh, then rhythmic half-speak

Ha

Listen to me

Comparing integers to affection

This is what happens

This is what happens when a man stays up too late

talking to furniture

Spoken, searching, an invented word stretched across several notes

The furniture is patient

The furniture is deeply

unhurried

It has a certain... furnishiosity

A grand word

for sitting very still and judging me gently

Longer, philosophical, the bass disagreeing underneath

But consider

Consider that everything I call a memory

might be a rumor

a rumor I told myself so many times

that even the walls started repeating it

back to me

with slightly different details

Muttering, catching himself, abandoning a sentence

The wall said

the wall said you left something

something about a

no

No that wasn't the wall

That was a person

That was someone I loved

and I am not going to finish that

because the accordion is staring at me

Whispered, breath audible, vulnerable, instruments disappearing

So I will say one thing plainly

One thing

I am afraid

of how much I love the ordinary

A cup

A doorway

The sound of a spoon

against a glass

A single piano note. A quiet breath. A half-finished sentence.

And I think that is

that is the whole

that is

the whole