Acrophobia

The boy falling from a balcony three-storey-high

is not falling. Rather, he challenges the rules

of attraction, floating in a bottomless abyss

framed by the black lines

of a comic strip panel. In penumbra,

the action lines smear and fade

from white to red to form the capital letters

of a stop sign. But this does not end here.

I reach my hand out into the viscous substance

of the dark. The fragrance of obsidian

is like the white clay kabuki actors

smear their faces with when they become

oni, Japanese ogres with eyes crimson red

like the wounded head of Apollinaire on a snowy day

of nineteen seventeen when he saw

a bombshell fall into the trenches.

I watch the ochre yellow and cyan blue fumes

of Munch’s The Scream from the interior

of its wooden frame. The paper canvas rolled up

inside of the devil’s pocket, the varnish

and the oil paints crack and chip off,

and my face falls again toward the grid

of the wooden board of a game of go

where no one has the need for a face.