hiatus (2003)

your eyes flicker,
(blue) captive butterflies

you have dosed again, tonight, you,
swallowing the bullet, scorching
cerebral cortex, and further -
you are denying yourself access to

fragments (of dream of paper
documents of the sounds you woke
to voices when you were little and
made soft of clay and of...)

we pay our way, enter,
descend via the stairs,

we break circles; halving and
quartering pills like slices of chalk

leaving the night's cold
counterfeit dreams

we are briefly
approaching perfection