Untitled
Can you cleave two thoughts apart?
like lifting a hand from a thigh
in the back of a theater?
The residue of life itself is an animal
To raise your head from the pillow
each morning is a promise
Light cleaves dust in the air
call it stage design—coordinate the music,
arrange the spectacle
Artificial, perhaps, but the sweat
is real
like everything else you’ve ever
touched
I’ve palmed my way through Manhattan
sought tongues in dark places
My right hand knows more than I do:
subway grime, paper coffee cup,
the callouses of East Village
Somewhere in the vanishing point of my 20s
is a locust caught in chicken-wire
and the swarm, coming
Peyton Toups is a writer with work at Pitchfork, Paste, and SPIN. He was previously Editor-in-Chief of the Penn Review. He is currently an MFA student at Columbia. http://linktr.ee/peytontoups