1:45 p.m. turns you into a tadpole

“What’s weird is that he’s so fucking beautiful.” Visitor
leaving psychiatric ward of St. Vincent’s Hospital, NYC.

The day is a translucent glass
of clear warm water: slaughters
all unwanted thought: its pearly cup
exceeds you with contained,
containing liquid diamond –
facet-less, but straining with
a proto-sentience for a setting:

reason to constrict and coalesce:
amphibiously wide-eyed with
its embryonic hope, you float –
discover you can breathe in it.
Spills and blunders of colliding
essences become your gills
and lungs: be a jewel, it wants

to tell you – wants to tell itself.
It is impossible to let another human
being know exactly what you see here,
but so urgent, oddly, to find ways
to try. You cannot not apprise
another mind of something
otherwise it would not sense:

tadpole in a crystal pond, too struck
by some invisible insistent wand
to know the tragic from the magic.
Thunderstorms are imminent
and light contracts – contrasts
with dark – all is starkly calm.
Strangely efficacious balm.


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