CDXVI.
Clock tower frozen at 4:16 for its 28th year now. scaffolding like spiderwebs like safety nets spiraling down its structure, numerals faded like any Roman plagiarism: white flames, faces of animals in symmetrical dozen pinned along that circumference where time was discernible. public records, private testimonies on its architect, engineers, or builders still without harvest, a drought tolling every hour down to the exact millisecond, for 28 years, while both arms remain transfixed: no signs of visible rust, yet possible blueprint of involuntary crucifixion.
but ideas are not identities, nor descriptions destinies, nor feelings facts: just factual for now. ophiocordyceps unilateralis, tropical fungus hijacking the physiologies of rainforest ants, possessing them to climb up a plant’s stalk, clamp mandible to leaf vein, & wait for its final act of bastard metamorphosis: from your skull another’s forest forces, spores of your sacrifice. repeating the cycle to repeat the cycle until the cycle no longer looks strange but like stranger looking up at the clock tower frozen at 4:16 for its 28th year now wondering why the safety nets? what possession compels any citizenry, sleuth, inspector, or sadist to go searching for stairwells?
same spectral symphony: strangers, stairwells, seeking, something, skylines, silhouettes, spores. rustless arms frozen as white flames flicker as animals’ faces cycle & shift in eternal clockwork.
Tsunade
analog anachronism: anarchy of one’s birth beyond any given binary.
voices with my mother’s eyes, birthday gifts a living room w/ eggshells
until we stopped keeping count. whole numbers to fractions, irrationalities,
carving equations on apartment walls with great-grandmother’s kitchen knives,
a dropout’s dissection, attempt at everything’s theory: I am here, I am me, yet I’m not.
on the edge of the bed watching myself crouched in the corner, handfuls of chamomile,
watching myself watch my other self from the ceiling, somewhere between waveform
& witness, my fourth self standing at the doorway like when parents believe you’re asleep.
the veil’s thinned, sometimes starved: not a fast, not an abandon, but an autonomous 3rd state, counting supernovas with an unfixed gaze, watching them disappear once I re-materialize.
dots & dashes, 1’s and 0’s, derivatives & diagrams & limits of our own language’s liability:
oasis more of a mockery once factoring the sea of desert surrounding one, as is definition as definition, immutable, predictable, always starting here, and always ending there, always. punctuation, question marks hooked through my jaw, this roofless mouth, unseen puppeteers waiting for either side of the tensions to relent first. how stubborn, binary of strings & theories. disobedience civil until it can’t be. pretending the string is a kite’s doesn’t disguise its intent.
lips like eyelids both stitched, be a doll. dragonfly wings halted in admiration of orb-weavers.
on the edge of myself watching the bed, walking on ceilings in fear of another living room,
clean & spotless & lightest of steps, my soles still scrape on eggshell, pieces of crescent moons neither here nor there, yes: in this I am free. pressed tongue to diode, knuckle clenching string.
Julio César Villegas was born in San Juan, Puerto Rico and raised in Essex County, New Jersey. Puerto Rico Se Levanta. https://linktr.ee/jcvillegas