Sabotaging the Sweet Tooth

My dreams are clear pictures of
the fratricide inherent in
secret societies.

My days are scratched out notes, unintelligible,
written by the shaky hand of an
African princess.

My thoughts are wild, and chaos
looks to me for inspiration, but I’m
too much in my madness.

My nights are all crickets, and
throaty frogs, sweet cakes, and
the absence of crows.

My self is uncovered like the rocky shore
at low tide, but my understanding is a cycle
behind and sees only high water.

Time is time, but the perceiver is
defining it as it goes.

I’m too much in my madness, but
it’s not enough to deal with time.

My African princess says I’m her,
“good friend” and that “I’m always kind”
but I know I’m sands in the hourglass,
the slow tick-tick-tick of turning gears,
shadows that rove over and across the wheat,
and the corn-silk that catches the dusty breeze.

I’m too much in my madness, but
it’s never enough, and chaos can’t but shake
its head at my unpredictable multiplicity.

I’m the die that come up sevens on every throw,
I’m the one man with a heart of gold,
I’m the wheel that does not roll, but rather skips,
I alone shout to beggars to “take my money before it
does to me what it’s done to you,” and
I’m the lion which cradles the mouse in its mighty jaws,
but
I’m also the mouse and the beggar, and blinded by
avarice when I see my own golden heart, and
I come up snake eyes often as not when I’m rolling.

My dreams are the slow motion
panorama of the infinite worlds
we all contain.

My days are the scapegoat my body
points to when my soul begins to ask
too many questions.

My thoughts have a mind of their own
and to say I have caught one is to say this
handful of sand is the very ocean itself.

My nights are still only sweet cakes
and the watching of ants, and the thinking
of the loneliest thoughts that ever were.

My self is the scariest thing though
always hovering above and behind me
somehow never there when I call it forth.

But my young African princess tells me
I’m her “good friend,” and I am “so kind to her,”
but what she writes on the page is only scribbles
and not even her own mother can read it.

-Kegen Dean Benson