A well awaits a where:
A chameleon concealed with an eye all askew
Stone-lidded rims ascending terrace rings.
Note the warm jellied tongue:
The interstate vanishes between hairless lips,
A boisterous room silenced in a slurp.
You imagined you were:
Hand-painted celluloid in the breath of a frame
Liquified by the belly of that gaze.
Foolish to have assumed confidence in a where:
Tailights, the attractive ends of women
Only winking will-o-wisps.
A sacrificial slip; a cry, a fall:
Fetched to that iris altar
To nightscape and a boulevard lined with lampposts.
Gravity’s inversion mirrored in energy:
Every little lighthouse radiating
A reassuring cold.
As if to celebrate an arrival:
Suspended paper motes
Drift in eddies intimating a jostling crowd.
Yet the street is silent, still but for a pale wind:
An air at home in caves.
Your footfalls provoke a hungry slant.
The patient churning of intestinal muscles:
Hastening your orbit around that sluice
Beyond the lamplight’s edge.
Joseph Byron Bennett
Bennett Diction 