If I Were a Poet

Time is a string of pearls
alternating white and black.
I live on the white ones;
you live on the black ones.

But then somehow my foot slips,
and I step on black
instead of white.

We enter an arcade,
and I am shattered into a heap of jagged
fluorescent shapes.
We talk for hours,
until the clock chimes
twelve times
in ambiguous AM or PM-ness.

I want to live forever
in this land-locked glowing pool
but your tear drops
like tiny prisms
shower colors on me from the stars…

We both know it’s time to go home.

At sunrise I open my eyes, alone,
clutching at the tattered edge of a dream.
I pull the shade
and try to believe there was a world out there,
that it’s come inside,
and that it will not leave
until I find a way
back to the black that separates
the white from white.