Dementia

gerburg garmann

You always talk yourself out of breath
When you hear these circular shapes of time
Slowly falling from what you used to call
the structural integrities of a lover’s cross.

As if soundlessly walking among fallen stars
were the only way not to cross mind’s red
and white lines.

Memory’s sagging rafters want you to live
from the outside in so you can see it all
from a different vantage point without needing
to stand on the tips of your toes to catch
the distracted clouds hiding in places
where balls and ores don’t cross.

Comfort these days is to be found in otherwise
meaningless accessories sent through
countless wash cycles. They make you stop
scrolling your kismets like a code-breaker
who looks for some encrypted life sentences
that always seem to be tucked under the keys
covered in invisible inks.

Spilled with coffee or tea, they hold the promise
of guided thoughts. You take them
for a perfectly placed miracle in a mad world.
Love is a simple salve that works most of the time.

Like that of water placed on a man’s parched lips.
But it’s a blue note for a red throat.
Revolving doors move you in circles.
Being a wild-thinker-purist, you hold the belief
that a broken heart is caused by as little
as a broken fingernail or modernity’s temporal cruxes.

Small blessings: You don’t see that the candle
is melting upside down, its wax dropping
on feline and other partners in crime…
Who’s going to slay the dragon today?
From here on out we commit to nothing but diets
that can do without martyr shrouds,
those that evoke battle cries of the circular kind.