I dangle over the bed.

The pillow becomes my soft, puffy bicycle, and I ride off into the flatness.

The surrounding space is invisible.

I’m a hunk of space garbage and time is a big nothing.

Something else comes over the horizon and it does much better.

It’s fierce and ox-like.

It adjusts me.

The single cry is “Help.”

I’ve got ten pages of what I call “doubt.”

I am more comfortable letting breaths out to where there’s plenty of room for them than taking them in to where I only have so much capacity.

I don’t know where to sit.

I don’t know what to do.

Where is there pleasure in turning around?

It’s all light green damp woods, all yellow star flowers.

The warming speeds up and this is what we get.

What we call “fun” the first person says is language for the rate at which pain subsides.

The second person says, “There are no frogs on the Canary Islands.”

The third person says, “Let it be dark so we can come to light,” on what we call “our continent.”

What we call “useful” the fourth person belittles.

We’re stuck awake in this limited territory in which our wills are free to roam.

The rain is no argument for rain.

I know it’s not all about us, at least not anymore.

It’s a complicated and windy structure to think that a general freedom is equally important to a freedom from suffering.

Let’s stop at the intersection which is the word “intersection,” and look both ways because neither is obviously preferable.

An autopsy of the statue reveals half my obvious love for you.

It’s exciting and it hurts.

I field trip down long stairways to the ocean.

I watch a school of giant fish come in.

I watch a man fight an elephant.

Children play in the rose-tinted waters.

Because I am disturbed by overlapping objects, I think I see boundary lines between them.

So what if uncategorized information overrules the categorized?

Let us love and to mate, oh!

Let’s wrap around each other.

Our loving is a maroon square, then a very light blue non-shape, then moon-shaped.

We are not cautious.

“The causation is viewed as the emergence of the event from the state.”

There is a general brightening and we snack on some Xanax.

The sea has sky over it.

Our breathing becomes complicated.

We return from our distant view nibbling at the birdseed of the fated flowers.

Composite physical objects with singular names rule over us.

We go downstairs to look for them.

We throw ourselves and our country balls against the walls.

We think this is definite, but it’s sick-bed work and not definite at all.

The only town exactly like this one is this one and any other town can only be as close as we are.

We are not twins, have hardly a future, and we are terribly windy.

Our words scoop up more than they can hold.

I get so sad to think of this and how it will feel to lose you.

It’s as if these are facts, or you’d lost your mind.

Your last moment of consciousness is nowhere but in the way the bits of a yellow light show through the moving branches of snow-covered trees.

Everything is worthy of our attention.

You speak of taking the poem to bed, living on the internet or in your girl’s desires.

I am that girl.

I want to turn my neediness into greater self-sufficiency, but when I’m happy, I want to be happier still.

I have tiny lightning bolts in a bowl for breakfast, one hundred and twenty states of consciousness and then some straight, clean, four a.m. lines.

Sometimes I change.

I’m the collection pool you pass through on your way to the store.

I almost can’t bear this feeling and I’m not feeling any “thing.”

I am an agitated squirrel without a nut.

I am the conviction of lined paper.

Yes, and some small goods must accumulate before we recognize them as goods at all.

Let me, (you let me), try to shock and hug you in one beat.

You have no system to absorb this drunk, this kick, all smiles and moving mannequins.

You are one of my so many missed conceptions.

You’re looking for a rental.

You are a composite yourself.

I rip you out of one book to mark my place in another.

Blue does not describe the book or the boat; it’s part of it.

It’s one child.

It’s decades and decades.

We receive another soft acceptance and we wear soft clothing.

Our bed talks to herself.

Our rose and elephant rings know each other.

We hold our first Sunshine Outdoor Activity Club meeting.   

Lesle Lewis is the author of Small Boat, which won the 2002 Iowa Poetry Prize, Landscapes I & II (Alice James Books, 2006), lie down too (Alice James Books 2011), and A Boot’s a Boot (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2014).  Her poems have appeared in many journals including Pleiades, American Letters and Commentary, The Massachusetts Review, Hotel Amerika, jubilat, Body, notnostrums, Barrow Street, Mudfish, Slope, LIT, Sentence, and Pool. She teaches literature and writing at Landmark College in Vermont and she lives in New Hampshire.