Rising each morning,
he finds himself
falling into memory
and its patterned rituals.
Most days do not cohere;
stories slag off as he walks
unsteadily down the stairs.
He does not fragment,
like a shattered mirror,
so much as crumbles
like cheap concrete
into piles of disaggregated
data— isolated numbers
floating in the air. The dust,
briefly, rises into the sun,
then settles like a benediction
across a landscape of sin.
He finds comfort in his ruins,
where the darker horror hides
in the ashes of the mundane.
(January 21, 2023)
subtext 