Penelope on the boredom bridge

Penelope on the boredom bridge
By Jayne Amara Ross

Light crawls up the buildings like fast and gilded ivy,
 Fireworks to the foggy eye, fencing the fickle season,
 My mind still buoyed in alcohol.

Penelope on the boredom bridge: fighting off the sleepy knock, my voice blue-boxing the last of the nocturnal phlegm, nausea sucking at my hips like a nylon nightdress.
 This feeling is inevitable, the imagined throne dolling out a doubt-dose to equal the lucky run of ineffable ease, confounding my calling.

And what of all this life I waste in waiting?

I’d be all the better for jumping off, breaking out of the tight-corset fist that holds me upon this hereditary plinth, undressing in water, kicking off the anchor of my clothes.
 But I’d be all the better for jumping off this slow freighter, the letting-go, the free-fall and unabashed rush ushering out the opaque efforts, milking the muddy flow.

The more I hug the boredom bridge, the further I fall behind.

It stung me for all my looking down, navigating blind, and yet I should have known that you were the leaving kind, your back built rude for the rucksack.
 My conciliatory efforts are met mid-fall with your imperious rhythms; your consonants clicking like the beads of an abacus, counting up my supposed slights.

Well, decision severs the withered extension, my heels too callous now for kisses, we were too late, too late to bake this failure into another cake.
 And time ensnared you and called you upon all your stealthy dealings, seething jealous in the backseat as the spores went at my mouth like a swarm of fat bees.
 And sadness swims over me like the shadow of a large flat fish, my heart dulling in brine, and yet it is never too late, too late to bake this longing into another cake.

The more I hug the boredom bridge, the further I fall behind.

Light crawls up the buildings like fast and gilded ivy,
 Fireworks to the foggy eye, fencing the fickle season,
 My mind still buoyed in alcohol.

Penelope on the boredom bridge: decision severs the withered extension, and I am a little lighter, lighter and a little lonely, wed to my wise words.