Anna Cates

Between the Lines

jungle view –
the muddle inside
my noodle

Some days the walls close in, your heart drums beneath your skin, a distant drumming, creeping through canopy and liana vines. You wonder who is friend and who is foe. Distanced from yourself, you cannot say, you do not know…

Miles away, red tape/ink/sky. Coffee scents and chatter drift from the sidewalk eatery below where a stranger plods the cobblestone in clogs.

I've been that stranger, as you have, the sexoesthetic invert in his pinstripe suit, sitting almost comfy on the fainting couch, ghost in a shell, haloed in dim light. We've weighted the same maroon divan, eaten the universe out of claustrophobic angst, drowned in dark waters of test tube dreams, our plans that never came to life, alternative realities Foucault had to translate, noodle alphabets floating in fiction soup.

devil’s tongue –
the path through the tangle
difficult to follow