Third Eye

What has this day given me?   What would retain in the dim labyrinth of my mind, what sticky bits find root there, to stay, waiting round the corner to find entrance in my dreams?  The hours are dull (full does not rhyme with that).  I can forget the conversations, individually, collectively. The ink on unlined papers runs. The chalk is blurred on blackboards that are green.  And my classmates have devised elaborate systems for cheating.  Their tattoos will tell them in uncertain hours who they are; pictures are much simpler than books.   The answers are embedded there...

I heard a song on the radio of the car parked beside me on the freeway somewhere upstream from the rumors of a jack-knifed vehicle on a bridge.  There is always an excuse.  There is always a reason.  Later, laundromat, same song.  Restaurant, same song.  I put it on, smoke some pot, and take a shower. Already the lyrics slip, spiraling down the drain.

My dreams are shallow treatises on loneliness and hunger.  By morning, I will have forgotten the song.  I will replace it with some scrap of music from my Morphean juke box.  "How am I gonna be an optimist about this?"   On my cereal, I pour the fog that obscures the sugar.  I don't drink coffee.  "How am I gonna be..."

Your face is made to accommodate the greedy grimace that you think is a smile.  You offer drama in lieu of imagination.  This is the way you see the world.  Your dreams are seemingly prophetic.  You don't have tattoos.  Can I believe you?  The only markings on your thin, translucent skin, were put there by some neglected god or spilled there sloppily by DNA.  In my dream there is a woman with a mole on her left breast.  She insists on calling it her third eye.  If this is true, her chest is winking at me.  In morning, you shrink from my fingers.  My touch is cool.  Your tits are on fire.  I would do better to go back to bed.  It would be better to forget these days as easily as I forget my dreams.