the branch that sways

[sweetwater]

I opened a book unto a night sky
and held each thought as if it were the original
as something too untrue to be believable

I pulled the cover off the couch
and laid there for the rest of the evening
as if I became myself again

as if the night opened and I ascended into it
as sounds and other colours calling in the unknown

the window unto a view and being half open
the lighted hallway in the reflective midnight
on the surface and the dark evening chatter
of people in the distant

these images and identities
awoke into the night
and alone in the calling emptiness of time
reaching out into a parallel system
imagining the movement of my body
through space

as if the feelings I was experiencing
were merely the testimony of
the time that it was happening

and each word that I read
became sentences in the blurring of shape and desire

each paragraph and metaphor became
the point of reference from which
two solitudes entered and died

[mtmynd]

they aren't called occurrences for nothing.