I May Have Died but I've Gone Nowhere

Once I walked inside your eye. You kept your girlfriend in there, the one you always talked
about. She wears a red dress, lives in a bed underwater, celebrates her birthday with a
panpipe–bass drum serenade. Of course she can breathe. You know how she got there but don't
like to talk about it. It must have been a spell because she can't leave like I can. They couldn't
charge you with kidnapping. They called her on the water phone; she said she was fine. You sit
around with candles and emote, but she's fine. You can see only what's outside your eye, so I
take pictures while I'm in. Don't look at them until I'm gone. No one likes a man who puts out
candles with tears. No one likes a man who lights too many candles, who keeps time by tapping
his foot, a man as simple as a zoom lens that pulls too quickly, an undertow.

*Title is a lyric from "I'll Be There" by Escape Club (#8 on Billboard Hot 100, 1991).

  

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Daniel M. Shapiro is the author of How the Potato Chip Was Invented (sunnyoutside press, 2013), a collection of celebrity-centered poems. His recent work has appeared in Rogue Agent, Hermeneutic Chaos, Maudlin House, and Unbroken. He is a special education teacher who lives in Pittsburgh.