but like all good ideas

A test--
Will I turn to the right or left--
I say, as if
It is not my decision.
There is a part of me
Deeper than agency.
I tell myself, anyway.
And I manipulate and dance about
And yet I never touch
Me,
As if I were another.
Self.
Where is self
And singularity?
Isolation is a hunger.
And a fast?
A fast to purify
All the cobwebs that may not exist?
To starve into submission
What is not a sin?
And amid all this,
What if the years deflate, and I am touched
By a curse I failed to cast away,
Despite my belief?
It is all the same, eventually,
And the memory is the fear.

----------------------------------------------------

I have bought into a cruel economics
In the name of reality.
The cheapest item, when lost,
May become precious as gold
Or as dust.
A dealer in second chances thrives
On the misery of the man
Who gave the first.
And I am all,
A god in these dealings--
I say, as I fall.
My suffocation
Will be my own.
Never yours.

----------------------------------------------------

In the poetry of the damned,
I take a verse and read.
It is my reflection staring back,
Sunken, gaunt,
A potential beyond my imagination.
His verse is familiar,
His voice,
My own.
Where we meet
Is where fear vanishes.
Disgust in division,
Desire in unity.
I am repulsed and drawn.
And when the spell is broken,
I see in his face
Desolation
And the spark of myself.

----------------------------------------------------

In this height,
I despise all heights.
The awakened sea beats;
I feel it, welcoming.
Deep it swallows, deep I stand,
Hard and cold.
Am I immune to erosion?
Weathered and tall,
Lofty and strong,
I shiver unmoving.
I will break before I bend,
I fear.

----------------------------------------------------

All this is mine,
This frail illusion.
Let me, at least, keep it.