I Subside

Am always

drifting,

wandering,

till I

finally

drift off.

Castles, heroes, and so many made-up pictures of you;

Dragons, winged poets, a river of gold and your liquid body;

You talk to me for the first time that I can recall

And I hear it all in exclusively enticing rhyme and rhetoric.

Actual dilemmas appear on the surface of what is, like

I’m not sure whether the first poet alive wrote about

love or about the agony of a lost love;

It’s kind of like a “chicken and the egg” situation.

Voices of teachers,

mothers,

and superegos

pounding on my consciousness.

My mass-produced, easy-to-build and will-easily-fall-apart

desk has never felt more seductively soft than

Now. I raise my head to resist its treacherous temptation

but notice that the air of dreams around me is too heavy.

Mistakenly I think I’m counting the words on my page,

- how many more till completion? -

but I’m only counting the seconds, always slipping away

from me.