Entirely Acedia

All morning you listened to a hornet stuck between the screen & windowpane.
You still hear the hornet, a quiet star in the quasar now.
All day, this vision haunting you: the Reaper & the Retriever—
the hallucinations are intimate;
a dog barks at the quiet, terrified.

The curse of the moondancer comes in the language of cyclamens:
Paint everything you love silver & gold
for the hope to find it again when it leaves. Well this language knows what’s lost is lost
& optimism vanishes in the fingers you push down your throat while you masturbate.

You want to be an axe wielding flagellant, or the largest boar
in the oldest boreal forest, everything drenched in brownish snow.
You could’ve been Persephone, Archimedes, or a child
playing a game in Michigan fall where you run through your very own woodland landscape, white oaks & purple maples,
trying not to step on leaves. You want only to be
what you could’ve been.

You still hear the hornet
but night sky has torn open, a fractal in a new galaxy’s formation
& you’ve lost stars, entire constellations.
Every night, black rainbow writhes in a parabola from the last massive cephalopod at sea
to a patch of weeds in your garden.

These confused nightmares write the world.

Nick Alti wastes time and then forgets about it. He’s a first year of the MFA program at The University of Alabama who hails from a redundant village in Michigan. In any situation he consistently feels like he’s doing something wrong, & we have it on good authority that he is. There’s more of him online at lovely places like Newfound, Hypertrophic, and Misery Tourism, or on Instagram @klonopin_stagram.