Post-Therapy Room

Flatness is all. The sunfish lives in it, And lichens spread in an insistent plane, Saving their strength. No time dimension.

Flat as a voice over the dictaphone. Wires, Mama, they do the thing with wires, As the sea-urchin spits his innards out.

To be the thinnest fillet of Dover sole On the narrowest china plate, to be dead flat, Waiting for the steamroller's iron massage.

Mama, with wires. They hang my shadow out, Opaque as Bible paper, and as thin. I am a lampshade made of human skin.

They ironed my marrow to a pancaked cell, And that was me. I was alive and well. Only the sweetbreads of the past were gone,

The little bumps of glands, concreted bones, Rib cage and skull, they flattened and were gone. Oh, I am superficial as the moon,

Flat smirks of eyes. I gather and come down, A single sheet of rain, a veil of shower Falling always in the same limited hour.

Flatness is all. The book has the one page, And mirrors have undone the actual lakes. I am too flat to inflate with lust or rage,

I am too large to be hurt, and spread too thin, And kept too clean for action to engage, Or for relationship to enter in.