smearing on the charcoal mask
to pull from my pores
the remnants of the day
and month,
the cool dark soothes as liquid
which will slowly transform
into solid sheet to serve its purpose

this digital ink, too, I smear,
to push days into prisms
from which are emitted
principal parts,
colorful actors

daily deadlines turned
light to dark to light
before, under and beyond my eyes
as just yesterday marks my birth
and another year begins

and in my attempt to slow it down
to understand what the poet knows
that the scientist does not,
to pick out prismatic light
and confine and confer meaning
in so many words,
the faster the days churned on
and light spilled forth
everywhere

there is a difference between yesterday
and today
pure white and black contrast
that holds everything inbetween
and if that holds
then, too, will tomorrow be altered
all over again
by the light and darkness that touches it

this is the essence of the matter
to me;
that the delusion of distance displaces us
from living life viscerally,
that a thing can be measured
and yet that is not enough

and so these verses will slowly begin to cease
having served and swerved through
the colors of my world
but this coming darkness
is not an end,
but the natural conclusion
of the splitting of things
that long to be together

lights and colors, all
rushing to rejoin
in singularity
in what is observed
through experience as dense darkness
but in me is felt as bearably light

it is enough
to have written it,
to have lived it to write it
in the first place,

and knowing that, now,
the light from tomorrow’s sun
will lay before me again
a world of orgiastic color