mmmccxiv

How Not to Touch

Fold your eyes
up into your head.
When they convulse,
contorted so, utilize
this, a means of un-
control, the same
awkward mech-
anism often used
to fly through
rafters with a
broom, the
apparitions,
those souls
so sickened
by ethereality,
the stubbornest
fools among the unliving,
who’ll spend a decade
swimming in long-dead
oak developing just the
frequency that gets a
floorboard to creak.
But you, unseen
observer of the
dead and the
undead, you
go about
mapping out
their movements,
every twist and turn,
the x, the y, the z,
the length of time,
and to the dot,
where one might
hover, fluttering
in place, like an
immortal heli-
copter, at just
the spot in space
(exactly) for the very
time it takes (just as
concisely) to manage,
just as your victim has
risen from bed, wrapped
herself among her linens,
glides across the floor, and
just as she’s about to
unlock the door
she’s buckled over,
burst into a momentary
gloom so intense the room’s
begun to spin, the dusty candelabra
shakes each stick of wax into a blur,
and then, back up and into exhalation
all is lost and well-forgotten once again,
her clammy hand has twisted up the
sterling knob until the door, awash
in morning’s purple light is open
and in a whoosh the ghastly
trick of decades of anguish
is out the door and
past a human’s
point of reference;
as is she, the
day is her
and always
was, and
you are
back to work
upon a better plan
to guide the living
ever quicker to
the end, no
matter that
in doing so
the two
of you’d
never
once
get so
intimate
as this, to
never
occupy a
kindred space,
in absolution
not to ever
even co-exist.