I can’t foresee the changes and I can’t know what I will, undoubtedly, regret, but I can come to see me as a future, you as a violent past.

By Christopher J. Adamson

The bed at the foot of the mountain, I wished it was brighter.
The train, delayed by summons and escarpments.
The fool feasting in the dining car, a child.
 
Me all callous, a harbor.
This thing around, a sentence.
A final dread, excavated.
 
It’s hard to be seen in the moment of shattering.
It’s hard and yet easy to be so undone
as the bird is, perched fitfully in the hollowed out bark of a conglomeration
 
of need, as they said it is,
the two dreamily seated, dreadfully composed
at my composition, a trifle
 
made to be somehow final, some
thing suspicious and meaningful.
She momentous, he accustomed.
 
Me silent, seated yet disembodied.
Upward some malignant eye, an eye of criticism
and of regret.
 
A lampshade, sheared.
Revolving passion unbearable or bared
like adding an “o” to “endured”
 
or fangs, displayed.
I wanted something more exact than failure.
A bleeding, my own stomach gored by reading.
 
I regret my dreaming, its final actor.
Regret my manic insistence on the symbols, a persuasion.
This hollow thing encumbered by grating
 
words, shriveled words
offered uselessly upward, I should have been looking down.
Down at the roots
 
those spread filaments, unequal in tenor.
Those hungry fingers, also bashful
like the child hiding under the table –

Those dreams, sudden like tubers in cunning and greed.

About the author:

Christopher J. Adamson is a poet, critic, and essayist whose writing has appeared in Boston Review, ZYZZYVA, and Southwest Review, among many other journals. He is currently Ph.D. student in Creative Writing and Literature at the University of Southern California. Read more at christopherjadamson.com.