Emily Kirchner

You can’t watch a movie
without blinking away
the retinal replay,
Every similar scene you’ve ever seen
Projected behind your eyelids.
Your day is a roll of cut film
Always turning, reeling reality.

You can’t tell a story without tripping over footnotes.
Your life is a novel made only of bookmarks.

Always wandering Wonderland,
Lost in nothing but yourself,
You can’t fall down the rabbit hole
if you bring it with you.

Maybe all thoughts you’ve forgotten
meet in the same space
and form a new brain,
a dead end memory lane
that drives nowhere but crazy.

Attention is your currency
and you’re rarely in debt.

You’ve collected bouquets of “Pay attention!”
and “You’re so random,”
Uprooted from your cranial canal.

You’ve been called an airhead.
It’s true, because thoughts are your oxygen.
Your head is a balloon floating up the stratosphere,
an expanding, collapsing universe.

Your glass is not half full or half empty
It’s overflowing,
drinking diminishing returns.

Still, you focus on loves and losses
with a poet’s precision,
Adjust hindsight and foresight to the same prescription,
Bifocal focus becomes tunnel vision
at the end,
where metaphors mix with light.

Wait.
What was this poem about?