it’s its own totem

the ego’s fetish is itself

mirrors confuse and distract it

the object is closer or farther away

the distance is backward or sideways

the self is a sentimental charm

a souvenir

it’s a prism

compulsively curating

broken down parts

grit of wasp in the sweet fig    

                                

Lately I ‘ve been hardly talking to myself, instead addressing a second person singular while formulating commentary and tenuous opinion on what catches my attention, naming the natural world in a gossipy way, reciting random lists of schedules and itineraries, or generally explaining my understanding of  myself-life-death-everything to the other: the one who doesn’t make my mistakes or have my suspicions, the one living inside my head to hear my stories and excuses.

And reading, reading, reading...literate historical suspense novels with deftly sketched characters/narrators, elegant descriptions and intricate, almost incestuous, plots which mingle with references to Thomas Hardy, the Belgian Congo, Edwardian politics, myths and etymologies - among other such mental canapés. The general atmosphere of the novels is a shady paranoia that eventually resolves itself into clouds of compromise scudding a bluer sky. 

There's traffic on the road beside the lawn I lay on, but my unfocused eyes hold a blur of leaves and I can't feel the tremors from insects and voles  in the ground beneath me while I ponder the carbon cycle to the edge of becoming to myself a speck blown aloft to the summer sky.

Somewhere next to a fascination of symbols and secondary understandings, my normally spastic synapses bobbing in pools of placid metaphor, you'll find me leaning against the languorous air of  summer afternoons that slowly turn to glowy twilight, cricket song rubbing the edge of dusk.

Thoughts flash like fireflies in the dim unknowing: ethereal interaction and nerve centers - signification and deep sonar echo soundings: what’s here?  what’s near or far?  when’s the rendevous?   bees to their hives...pollen motes in lemon light...my mind daydreamy, lazy. All my pretty phrases and the rounded corners of wobbly philosophies flare then float to ash - like amaretti wrappings - in the buzz and whirr of summer’s slowed spin of day.

The longest day is never long enough.

Down the shore.  Knocked over by the white surf of grey waves then leaping back to the crash again -  stumble-legged, weak-kneed from watery tumbles, lethargic limbs, air thick with the taste and scent of salt, sun glare, tinted shade under a beach umbrella, sand grit, briny skin and hair, the sough of tide.

O sweet mercy of confessional murmurs drowned out by the sea and cicadas.