Trick Says

I am here”

He sits facing me

Static gaze

Head close clippered. Hands on table

There is a growth on his right pinky

like a slender erect nipple

One of the many ways he is flawed

I am completely deformed by him

Born with such willingness

I am almost wholly right for his wrong

doing.

“As you go with me, I tell you things

Unaccustomed to vertigo

I am so small in his presence

the ledge of his brows

casts a shadow

from which I’ve fallen

His goatee is frayed wire, unruly coil

If  he licked the surface of  his lips just now

I would shatter into self-questioning

a puzzle of unseemly

shards.

“When you see with your ears

and hear with your eyes

then you are near me”

Finger by finger

he cracks my knobbed joints

Searches above each “Pop!”

for ache pealing in the brown silence

of my conflicted eyes

I am at war with his smile

Collaborator in my own liberation, demise

He shushes me: “Think less”

We stand. I follow as if  I were his

child.