January comes, and he forgets to look both ways when crossing
the street. To say forget implies innocence, that it was not a choice.

Light that is not quite morning not yet day sleeping just
below the sky’s marbled skin. Morning is another way of saying

is it over yet? Over his doorway, he staples jade leaves for good luck.
He believes he needs it, his face looking both forward and back,

as if his past indiscretions might help better steer him from the
future’s pitfalls. He does not trust himself with this world.

It is far too thorny, too quick to draw blood. This world wears eyes
in the back of its head, never letting him out of sight.

Where has all the love gone, he often wonders. At crowded
crosswalks, he can nearly feel the velvet breath of the tomb.

Men leave him behind in his bed because he lacks the courage
to transform into a gold finch, a lion, a dragonfly. Anything

that might make him miraculous. Instead, he accepts that he
is a sonata with no name. A music that seeps into the peat

and becomes food for the speckles of creation we cannot see.
When he returns home, he pulls the same books from the same shelves,

elucidating on the machinations of lovers who are closer to being ghosts
than being his own. Time is sour, metallic. Like blood in his mouth.

Like a split lip. He swallows the darkness of his room every night.
Drowns in it. Gorges himself with it. He is imagining waking before

he’s wise enough to fall asleep. He is, most days, merely dying and living.
Living and dying. He is two heads for the price of one,

certainty in the uncertain; proof that nothing, not even love, can be proven.
But today is a good day: he chooses to look both ways when he crosses the street.