Words collect like moths at a light bulb. Words at the tip of my tongue (or pencil, or fingertip). One of them sandwiched between parentheses, another hanging midair, waiting.

These days, I take slightly longer to think. Tonight, in a teahouse alone, I sling the earth’s latitude over my shoulder, like the strings of a violin; I allow myself to glide with the planet’s spin. I notice florescence, out of the corner of my eye, the blush of a child who can’t recall how to mouth a bad word. Tealeaves dissolve in my throat while I decide how I feel, it takes awhile for a smile to appear—the world’s axis upon which caravans crawl—and even when one does, it’s apt to disappear.

A sentence pulls at me, needing to see the light of day. Sometimes I feel big, and sometimes I feel small. On the days I feel big, I eat nothing at all. On the days I feel small, I climb to the highest rooftop and holler at the sky. I don’t know why . . . I am fading, they say. [I put torn wrappers from cough drops and our condom inside brackets]. They are mine, all mine, every last one. I’ve got leftover bruises, and his stale cough.

How many “maybe’s” can one muster? How many one-day-lifetimes? We exist like houseflies, or dust mites. Yes, let’s utter hello on the telephone and then travel backwards through spacetime, twist the earth like a toy top, plot appropriate coordinates to effectively revisit the one-dimensional moment, or a semblance of a moment, or a mere fraction of our lives, rather than letting the days go by, all la de dah. I am the internal combustion that makes him regret; guilt benefactor. I am his sneeze. A word girl again (it’s not my fault). I’m glad I never wrote this poem I’m pretending to pen.

The lights outside echo in the night, clinging to darkness, yellow halos . . . every moment becoming a ghost of itself. Each second glows, reverberating the sky’s vertebrae. I want to ask: What is time undocumented, voices unrecorded, or words unwritten?

And, autumn is analogous to ash. A simple refrain from years past. A window, a telescope glaring at the sky’s eye. A butterfly net, I need, to catch the words that fling their bodies against the pane to dirty the glass. Syllables I choke out with each clouded breath; they coil, solidify, threaten to crash.

What has happened to today? The sky not quite opaque, and the night we all wear like a cape. I move as the earth moves and the cars drive and the city sidewalks glisten and the little girl strolls by the window misremembering today’s date, for it does not matter to her. I move through waking dreams and impermanent hours, as trees die and the check comes, as the memory we share dissolves into an unnoticeable speck.

In the diner, that night, he ordered (orders? will order?) potato pancakes, and they brought applesauce as his bonus prize. On my couch, that night, he held (holds? will forever hold?) my stuffed elephant like Simba, singing with it to make me laugh. How to rephrase and magnify? How to constrict the minutes and lengthen the red shift?

He pulled me into his aura and sucked the words from my breath. I remember, in the diner: he overdrew his account while I spotted a fat rat watching, red eyes through the window. I paid for his meal, took him to my room, and hours flew by until dawn said hello. He tasted my lips, without asking me first, and admitted his tongue belonged to another. Together we created an improbable Ouroboros; time forever chasing its tail.

These days, the antidote is silence, and Epicurus cannot pronounce my name. These days, I misplace words: they hide in drawers and unstitched pockets. I sit surrounded by books and boots and brainwaves, breaking words into two, un-broken, don’t you see? There’s never enough space, every morsel of matter carries so much weight. Tea sinks to the bottom of my spleen. I’ve got an ink splotch on my finger and a writer’s scar displayed. We’ll make as much as we can of the bad luck and go on our merry ways.

What’s one word got to do with another? I don’t know.