Quandary: A Poem from 'Incompletion'

QUANDARY: A QUADRINA

Ever feel yourself porous, riddled all

over with absences that render you see-

through, open to the raw? No solid edges 

between your body and the invading world?

 

Are you less and less tethered to the world

each autumn, more disembodied and feint, all

pliant and complicit with the high-pitched edges

of the gale? Are there dreams in which you see

 

yourself the prey of creatures you never see,

metallic ticks and nano-mites gnawing the world

to a shell? Do you feel you’re ceding all

agency to a feigned voice at the edges

 

of your attention, no secure edges

between your mind and the virtual world

seeping in through devices we no longer see

for usage, haptics? Dawn-waking, are you all

 

scattered out across the gauzy fields, your world

fraying and unthreading at the edges?

                                                     (first published in The Interpreter's House)