On nights my body’s faulty wiring  
jolts me from a dream of static,
I rise–a ghost rehearsing breath.  
 
Then the blue fills the room.
A lecture murmurs: “Desert hermits,  
stretched on faith, starved 
for visions in the sand.”
I doze, I settle, I smoke and inhale 
the lines of their devotion—its relentless
work.

What hunger built those monasteries?
Not mine, no–

 
very unlike this one: my solitary den 
and the streetlight’s smear on pill bottles.  
Dawn bleeds at the window’s edge.  
The birds and cicadas call a chaos,
a code I am not meant to understand.
 
But I do listen. And prepare for the day
to be reset
as it is each morning. I am urgent.
The air fills my cracked lungs
like the bitter thick of coffee.