There were pieces of skin sneaking out of holes in jeans and missing buttons from shirts and missing thoughts from brains and twisted coffee cup sleeves and stains on blackboards where chalk should have been wiped away and blind eyes where we were meant to see pixels that were falling –
-falling away from each other when all of the atoms used to kiss and make love, but now they’re divorced and all of our DNA strands reject themselves and so we sleep while single helixes stomp away, shocked by their fresh cynicism-
the one that’s the same one that our fingers are saturated in when we adjust our dunce caps to keep them on straight and our ears transfixed on the auditors in our dreams so that our pupils don’t have time to spot the jester’s suits in our own shadows.
We’ve stopped hearing the empty echo in our own laughter.
Alysia Slocum