Dark Cocoon 

You can climb me now, mountain –

it is your turn:

                         I am returning to pupa,

                                                                  reversing the film of my release,

growing back to that place

where the lights burn

only to char memory moths.

Exoskeletons can soften

                                           if you remain human –

                                                                                    hers did…

…what was it my real mother sang to me?

“Every fraction of the way does more to make my doubts seem real,

every day to every day was much too hard on how I feel:

I feel I’m talking to myself when I say what I mean,

more than once the perfect words sounded wrong.”

Hiding in dim cafés behind bottles,

                                                             candled or liquored,

                                                                                                no longer works

when you cannot go home

with the waitress, 

                                cannot go from the neck to the nipple.

Still I see myself

between earth and sky,

                                         traversing a ridge,

                                                                         stealing time by a cairn –

but today’s boot needs to be on the other foot,

something needs to come to me

before I decrease,

                                slip back into insect cloister,

                                                                                  re-weave silk ‘cross incised exit.

The italicised quotation in the middle of this poem is from It’s Hard To Believe in Love For Long by Tim Hardin.

Ted Eames, 2018  

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