Prosopagnosia

All tomorrow’s for reservations. People ask
for masks and venues to wear them while I
like a comma, scenting bright
pixellated warmth, follow a girl
through nearly hermetic conversations.
I don’t ask her name because
I can feel its memory in clots of braille
on my tongue, a thing known only
to nociceptors on fingertips
and I want to go blind.
All my words are inmates rattling
enameled cages, begging pardon
in sentences from a Panopticon tongue.
I crack a beer with my eyesocket; the cap lodges,
blood monocular. Then the lights go red.
I am costumeless. Decoupled.
Somewhere a train is leaving.
And when the speakers’ volume calves
I drift away,

the silence denudes me.

A Convex Hull

Inward I go mute

teething a thought that gestates
and passes with the gravity
of a kidney stone, under inversions
of trilobite battle formations
lit by the capillary effulgence
spreading from the single lamp
that depends from the ceiling.
The walls bicker and vie
in race of palettes.
In the morning
my landlord will finish painting
and fully translate the room
but now with all the furniture
tucked in a corner my echoes
triangulate and return amputated,
toppling on a dry hypotenuse.
The room contracts to bound
the irreducible space of self:
finite, cutaneous and lacking
in positive pressure it spills forth,
scalar like fever escaping a clean room,

then I have a voice again.