encased by the face
and sometimes locked,this
masticating mechanism wrestles
with an unruly blob of buds

this morning while meditating with my two eyes closed and turned inwards and upwards to an invisible apex in my mind’s eye, i tried to imagine a bright beaming light while also keeping my tongue to the tip of my two front teeth and letting its fat backside expand across the topmost part of my soft palate. it was hard to conjure this bright light—it came in flashes, shapeshifting and at once disappearing. my mind kept going back to that old trick of imagining that superimposes an image of the outside, posturing it as the present. it was easier for me to imagine, say, sitting in a dark movie theater looking at a wide all-encompassing screen with a single white light gleaming at its center. but to hold onto a light of my own making in my mind in that exact moment requires a continual return to the origin, to the moment of creation in which i summoned the bright light, or in which it decided to reveal itself to me.

staying in the present is like enduring a million tiny deaths, each moment expiring as quickly as it comes—or, stretching into one long stay, a clear vessel containing revolutions 

dizzily she twirled
a pretty pear-like pirouette 
saturated with the swell of heat 

on a roof beset by industrial playthings, a bicycle without a chain rigged atop a rocking horse base. the bike teetered forward and back and we peddled without restraint, the silvered moon set high against the sheet of the night sky. when liz was riding and rocking in place, this moon sat perched just above the gentle point of her black cape-like hood and she laughed freely and looked back at me, eyes wide and white, teeth bared like a creature of the night.