As Soon As It Stops Working

You say: as soon as it stops working,
you’ll stop doing it.
And sometimes, blinking, jerking, accidentally verging on some thin
translucent fringe of liminality, you feel yourself tugged just a touch

too far towards whatever isn’t there –
and wonder why you try
or what you’re trying for
and then, somehow, perhaps to stop you contemplating stopping,

something gloriously rears up –
godlike, tall and glowing, gorgeous, golden, halo-ed
and too flagrantly aroused, alive and here to entertain
the least reality of the abyss

your pale involuntary private mumbling anxious fear suggests –
madness to go on with it and madness to arrest it –
so you take a breath and coalesce
into another strange display –

as your imagination splits kaleidoscopically again to breed
another dimly fathomable day. Gremlins in it
wrestle, burrow, seethe and forage.
Everything takes courage.

.