Apartment Life

Perfectly fine
and tied in a tether
of dead quiet
in a small room
where we've
acknowledged
a rift with rehearsed dictions,
our fictions drive us crazy.

You're building
set models
for stage productions,
I type paragraphs
regarding glaciers and grime,
we've seen how the
sofa divides the room
like halves of the same brain
that's stopped sharing
what it knows.

Not a stick is touched,
there's not a dry glass in the house,
everything that is old
is wrong again.
During sleepless and stale sadness,
I hear the witless irony
and cringe in make believe shivers.
A branch breaks off from
a tree outside, crashes
to the patio, giving way
at the lightest caress of
incidental wind.
The goddamned thing just gave out.

And into dreams that come I think
that there's nothing wrong, women are bitches,
and I shake with fever,
I sleep for hours under a flashlight moon.