The Spiral of Time

the spiral of time 

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is a cyclical portraiture. 

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for example, 

you wish you could remember what color my eyes are. 

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but you know my eyes squint in the same way my mouth crescents into pink when I’ve drunk too much gin. you know they split an atom whenever they respond to the call of your yawn. it’s known my eyes vanish like moral support when my mom tells her church she’s keeping the baby. my eyes went horizon-wide the first time they were sun-bit in the Nonni’s front yard, a croquet mallet rising from my chubby grip. when the first, third, tenth therapist played out that sitcom cliche of puppets patting each other’s crotches my eyes thin drawbridges drained a few splashy streams. when Pops rears his head back, laughing to exhume ten tubs of loose leaf tobacco, three bottles of Bulleit, one tab of that *good* shit, man, his eyes that are the antecedents of mine spread like the i in thin toppled over. 

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and my eyes are dashed in finger-tip hot sauce and back-of-the-hand rubbing that break through the thinness of the weekends spent making sense of the doom, making sense of the strange same in the new. the creak of my rusty eyelids still slicks with gin, only difference is in the date on my phone when I summon Lyfts at 1:46 in the morning. the yawns I pick up in my face echo from yours, not *yours* anymore, that yawn sitting on Yesler Way with that asshole Macedonian landlord. 

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and I knock myself into tomorrows with croquet mallets that I swear to god are the same ones I squinted against when I was six-years-old. 

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my eyes hold some color, but below the snow blind of repetition, maybe it’s not the color of a painting that matters.