ravenous and empty
whistling through the hole in the mountain
and the dice in a cup, a
nausea rolling from the roof of my dormitory
is on me like a parasite. it is on me.
it is a third of the world at any moment
an impossible air i breathe
it is in, now
with owlfeather eyes,
repeated within the halls indefinitely as a fugue
with a body eclectic
rattling against the wind, too far from
the exiled jewel-tones of lullaby and chiming bells.
it is the mark of a wakefulness i will not understand,
so i return again to your home wondering
where the nausea came from
and when it will stop churning
like the voices of heaven and hell and the in-betweens clattering:
sounds pitched higher than old men's ears
yet too present for them to not notice.
it is the mark of a cosmos
not made for the ones like us, the ones deigned to hold
our dry heads above our bodies submerged
in heaving, shimmering, iridescent water.
now see the nausea breaking the surface of the river.
it creeps upwards, inwards,
it is the messenger of the rapids
that contain all worlds.