Jeff Burt

You Had Me at Paranoiac Obsession

I confirm that boundaries/fences/borders/lines,
what my mother told me to watch out for
and what my father said crossing would lead to ruin,
dissolved like sugar in hot coffee
and I found you chemically electrically magnetically
gravitationally attractive like a singularity
with its infinite stretch that sucks in
all adjacent matter and condenses it.

I felt compressed, summarized, depleted,
at a loss sitting squeezed beside you at a table
that seemed to be in motion under coffee cups
and you twitching and craning left and right
looking for the subjunctive person in a corner booth
who might be deciphering your thoughts
through an adjacent hot spot,
I being pulled apart by your encoded passwords
with the passion of a swirling nebula
losing its center as a black hole unwinds it.

ToC