This is a poem about si(gh)te.
published in Tarmara Kalo’s The Optics of a Rising Sun
[ the debt collector ]
do you consider yourself held
only when eyes keep you?
beholden to how they create you.
if the insight does indict
and the image inverts—
it is the preoccupation
with your defamation
that admits to myself,
I am obstructed.
I claim:
the debt is created
when you regard the merit of the beholder.
your consideration sets your price
&their currency is the number of times you repeat
“am I”
“am i?”
in bed,
at the mirror,
here.
the money bet against you,
is debt taxed
by the burden you’ll carry
as you waste your mother’s words on a deaf collector.
[ the lover ]
if you ask a woman why she yearns for touch
she’ll name the body as the site of true love.
a synesthesia that makes images of forgotten and future injury
the landscape of her life.
a woman marks her life in pain and lovers,
known and unknown.
and vision here is the craving for a witness.
except under scrutiny,
her garden always wilts.
so maybe your sore eyes should avert the bloom.
[ the blind ]
I would not gift the blind, sight.
the sentence swallows itself,
because you cannot present
the collapse of imagination
as a favor.
remember you prevent your eyes to hear better.
there is uncanny symmetry between the blind man
–and the man blind to himself.
For both:
absence renders the image,
completion is the enemy of reality.
and deception, a double negative.
if you choose to know yourself
as infinite variations of reflection,
the kaleidoscope,
you,
might come up against yourself multiple times,
consider itself false.
and never know “I am”.
[ me ]
I throw my body against glass,
shattered as shards,
my image is everywhere.
Dancing off the rays of your light’s eye,
add it to the bounty.
Wear me like a stone mined,
a conquest unearned.
I throw myself against me.
I do not want to shatter.
I do not want to be seen.
I do not want to make a whole scene of me.