First-Person Personal

First-Person Personal By Sy Roth Here adrift wrapped in a coat of heebeejeebies Fearful of using the first-person personal Masking it instead by holograms of itself, Playful non-entities cavorting among the semi-living. Used to squirrel the words away like nuts now dormant in a tree’s hollow Used to look for them wherever they could be found tail-fluttering into the hollow Liked the slippery sound of them as they glissaded off a silent tongue Dangled them before hungering nonentities like low lying fruit Their future use, buried treasure, gleaming like cold stars in a vast firmament. Unemployed laborers eared, waiting for them to scissor-jump into a cold lake Befuddled the inattentive of their existence when readied Finally, to spring into action and gut them with their rapier wit. Not this un-notable vessel wrapped in this veneer of corpus colusum They won’t dare come out of the shadows at this stage They are muted heiroglyphs, attempting to grab at the fruit That stare back in disbelief from their hidey-holes after vacationing far too long. They’re toying with their elusive selves while the world has grown quite deaf To the speech they could have generated Metaphors they could have been imagined Trapped in brains flooded with desiccant, afloat in hoary-icicled valleys. The words are now muted and elusive They bellow for release, Walked across the bridge of tears No more to paint the world in umbers and lilac.