I quiver like the white moth I found perched on my bedroom wall. Bad news flutters in, in traces it seems. First an omen, then an ache, then a fever in time. I lay awake in the dark and I find that I quiver from imagined states and doomed possibilities.
He came home with a paper. And he stood at the door.
Just a paper!
To proclaim!
That something’s not right!
I speculate in bed sheets and I dream nights before that it’s ugly or nasty or sinister too. It’s that spot. That damn spot! By the door at the front. Because bad news comes in papers and statements, proclamations, and bills. It comes in numbers and data and lab test results.
I wonder somehow if I might veer off this
that
or
those ways
that I might not slip off the course. I imagine that I move steady onward.
I’m a spirit conductor, driving on for us all through my neural pathways!
I concede to a resonance of light.
And I believe that I might in spite of this, be part of it, apart from this. And in tragedy and travesty I’ve got to see new ways to shift
space
between
cells
and movement
between
atoms
I’m a particle shifting phenomenal machine!
Someone’s sick, I can tell, and I wake in a fright. Should I have freed the white moth which quivered that night like I chose?
Like my lungs and my heart and my fingers and toes. In times I find that I quiver like snow shifts and feathers flip round round in my chest. I quiver like papers and death rattle pulses of cicada summers and BRAT! TAT! TATTATTAT!
…has me rolling in splinters and hay season itch
…has me droning in half-sleeps and half-dreams and twists
…and I’m groaning, growling, guzzling, and GRAT!-GRAT!-GRAT!-ifying that itch!
…it’s growing in pitch, tone, and that aggravating twitch…
That sensation, irritation, palpitation pump, flip, and flutter and I can’t breathe now… I can’t reach now the end of the way
through the center
down the right
over here
and
up
there!
That I might catch at once the bad news before it falls at my feet.
That I might catch the white moth and cicadas so to unleash us instead to wishing field fireflies.
Days left behind, not to
begin again this way at this point in time, death omens, premonitions, and shivers away.
Does bad news come in shivers, and tremors, and quivers at night? Does it come through the door, on the floor, with the moth? Does it slip through our fingers, and flip through our reasoning?
When inside we might find that our lonely cells die and replace within all of us bumps, lumps, and bruises and turns, twists, and moods.