Day is brushing the brush off my back. No. Dawn is
tracing the margin of my being with unpleasant certainty.
Today is a truck? It shakes this structure in which we sleep.
Yes. That’s our new definition of dawn. No reason to share
dawns these days with strangers. And that something so arbitrary
as Sun played scheduler for so many centuries?—like Feudalism,
then Welfare State. Like secrets swelling in your absence.
In my new dawn you are barely a face. Inkblot eyes and mouth
a simple laceration. You know how easily you appear
in the corner of my vision to remind me where I am not,
in the corner of what I am not to remind myself of,
in the corner of my screen to furl, unfurl, tap, there, there’s
the slender magnet arresting the iron flecks of my data…
You will betray me. Leave me alone unsure of my own
periphery. My eyes, these tiny factories of forgiveness,
at what rate will my optic machinery depreciate—do I worry
about these decreasing returns to scale? The splat sound
of the shower water as I wring my hair in my new dawn. My day,
my data, how much of you do I lose with this dawn?
