and you shed your skin,

cling to the pieces and consume them

like sheets of grocery-store seaweed

in the air, you become something other than

yourself, tissue-made torc-body dressed in

crown moulding and a sweatshirt

you watch some mother who is

crying to the kisses of a romance movie

in a way that makes you think she is either

loving someone or losing someone or both

and outside your window the world

is pooled below you, a pangea

who left her laundry out to dry

on a curtain rod and remembered to

forget it so she could watch it fall to beautiful

jagged pandemonium. this reminds you

suddenly of everything that never was

that you are in the middle of nowhere

wondering about nothing

that, as your exhales cloud into a

being of stale-breathed death, you are lonely

in a crowd of subliminal messaging grasping at the

diary entry of what it is you wanted to do, where

you wanted to go, how you wanted to live —

it eludes you. that you are one

of many such travelers, driving a paring knife

between the stretch marks of this wavering terrarium

and searching for a destination in the afterbirth

and that in this space where time loses

its name on a sonar-less shout,

you have only ever been trying to remember