Inky strips like lizards’ tongues
Hissing from the cylinders, so
I’m in mind of reptile minds.
I’m a junky for the tethers
Of zone to zone zero.
Now a cone of blue light,
Floating motes adance
Against the dark. The sighs.
The great humanist eye
Of ten thousand prismatic mirrors,
A lobe of lights,
The threaded frequencies of neurons
Come asunder.
You know the one whose gazes
Follow down the sidewalk,
Surrounding you in shop window glasses.
You enter the diner.
You are not alone,
The many eyes upon you,
Brushing rain from your hair.
They are everywhere.
But one wonders how they pay the extras,
How they soothe the phobias
Of the withering stars,
The producers lingering
In hotel lobbies,
Eyes upon the door.
The elevator rings,
Ripe diegetic cues. The requisite
Minutes past, not too many, not too few.
Get up and go to bed.
And now at last, the spilling
And the spreading
Of those beating hearts of being
From the theatre to the eaves,
Dissolved again in seeing,
The sighing of experience
Deep into the neck of night.
Daniel Parsons holds an MFA from the Writer's Foundry at St. Joseph's College, Brooklyn NYC. His work can be found in various places, including the Matador Review, drDOCTOR, Manhattan Magazine, and others, plus he's been a featured poet in River Styx Magazine's Hungry Young Poets series.
