hide and go seek, more at stake, don't look back. don't uncover your eyes.

under this strange heavy grey haze of sky. i am an apparition, one of those rare beautiful –tion nouns that blurs the line between concrete thing and abstraction. invisible and visible at the same time. there and not there. i am made of paradoxes.

i wake every morning and pull back the sheets and see a body, all flesh and bruises and bone and red, and every time i am surprised.

we are all dolls in this, you know, marionettes. hoisted along by therapists, pills for dancing, nutritionists and hospitals to paint our faces again when our color fades. without them we are lifeless but with them we do not move on our own either. when i pull the dogs onward and they don't get to sniff, they do not think, i will never know what that smell was. they are all joy all the time; they do not have a past that makes them glacier and stone.

i wake every morning not knowing who i will be. apparently other people are sure of themselves, their traits, how they will react to things and what they believe in. i wake before dawn every morning. it's not that i want to get ahead. i want to catch up before you see i am no more than a tangle of vines.

bougainvillea is a thief. having no shape of its own it takes on others' and over time assumes that stolen identity. the intoxicating colors distract from the nothing beneath.

garnet hair and bones and cigarettes, hermiting and words. the moon only reflects and if we do not see her how do we know she's there, what she is like in the dark or the glaring bright of day?