charades

Mute at night and deep in one of those realms.
Odd how a world can shift blithely to that world.

Someone has come for a visit.

So friendly, so smiling, so deep and thoughtful,
so humane, such a wonderful sense of humor.

But these eyes keep sliding into blind spots off your being.
I can't quite see you, only sense the contours of your being.
I think you are more a volume of perfection than a visitor.
And like a rustic peasant, I am ashamed in your presence.

So?... I become a living charade, a silent actor
flailing his desperate shapes, moving ridiculously,
pantomiming ritual acts of guessed-at hospitality.

What in the hell does this all mean?

Mute, I am trying to be hospitable,
even in a house built on severe angles.
Mute, I am sweating bullets over food,
what dishes from my miserable larder?

This must be what being crazy feels like.

Your dream visit could never have been normal.
It could only have been your unwitting gliding
into the world of my delirious, signing absence.

I have very little substance. I am a surface,
an airy tabula of broken signs and gestures.

All this silent motion and clueless insinuation
is the acting out of a film too odd for Sweden.
It's more a tragic-funny page from Dostoevsky.

Waving hands wildly and making ridiculous faces,
hoping the solution will come before I wake up,
hoping to learn the allegory of your perfection.