Headlights

there is a window
that I look out of
sometimes.
only at night.
only when the moon is out, and swollen yellow,
and the time that glows green
across the black face of the microwave
reads well past 3 a.m.
there has to be a certain feeling in the pit of my stomach,
a fear, a sickness, a garish stretch of future
staining the bedsheets of my room so that
when i leave the cool dwelling of sleep
i will feel as if i am escaping
god, death, truth—who knows.
in the window, far in the distance,
past the monochromatic stubble-swathed scalp of spring backyard
and the misshapen thin comb teeth of tree branches,
there are the tiny, ghostly orbs of passing headlights
floating silently across an invisible ribbon of road.
i can almost reach through the cold glass and touch them,
bring them closer, burn their outlines
into the backs of my eyelids.
i can almost
capture them like fireflies in a jar
to prove that someone is breathing out there in the wind and the darkness.
there is a window
that i look out of
sometimes.
and someday i will rise
and crash across the floor fearlessly,
and shatter all the transparent eyes of my old house.
i will swim through the blueblack night to those headlights
to find
a scattering of dead light bulbs
and the realization
that the only thing that kept the devil from my bed
the blood from my thoughts
the violence from my flesh
the terror
from my belly
was belief in those lights that
have departed like a painful, sweet dream
from consciousness.