I try to deliver but the tall promises were made before my birth.
Taller than the silk-cotton tree. The fluffy fibers
escape the capsules before harvest. Haze of plush hallucinations.
Outbreak of wrecks. How will I climb the tree?
I climb but the thorns tear my flesh. I clamber
for the crest, and multitudinous mosquitoes come.
They encircle my head & neck, every step I ascend,
thousands in number, buzzing & biting,
endless rosary beads of them, who never sleep,
pricking for light through the pores of porcelain.
The wind hurled them from my past lives,
now they spiral themselves across
the future of my falling & failing.
They become a callous cloud. I become a ghost,
then live another day. I slap my hands. A mosquito
caught in between. A photon of light
in the ocean of darkness. I move an inch.
I look at a spirit in the shine of the crescent moon,
riding on a grey horse of closuring clouds.
I slither down like a spoiled snail
on the slippery stem of a floundering life.
I ask the spirit, am I moving anywhere?
And he says, in a voice that's also a muted cue,
roughly nowhere.
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