PILLOW FORT

(Otherwise known as Apocalyptic Fable, of Sorts)

 

Like every morning before I find myself struggling to patch together a new life somewhere outside of the old, but instead just end up building another pillow fort. Something to hold together until the sheets come crashing down—a modest temple in which to count my mounting loneliness. I find an old broom to hold it all up. Inside angles dream of going not crooked. Pinched-together knots improvise their escape. Milk colored quilts shudder & ceilings sag like a secondhand circus tent. Rather than leaping light comes clawing its way through ratty zags as silence bends like moonbeam genuflecting in a prism. I sit staring, from morning till midnight, through cracks in the system imagining a somethingness to spare; to gauze over this ink of hollowed nothings & nevermores. Sometimes I might grow a little bored, turn on a fan to replicate a windblown storm or call the dog to come galloping in from another room, catch its fang in a pillowcase just to concoct some minor drama. But on the whole I am steadfast, resolute in the destructions I am willing to pretend into being. All of them pretty in their own way, all of them noble creations. Seahorses swimming in a test tube. With teeth tucked under tongue one might could count them all. Imagine it: Everything we’ve ever built…Every little life we’ve fated to come crashing down on us & somehow, still, always finding a broom to hold it all up again . . .