In honor of the best day of year!

Today is the last day of 2011, and that means another all day Twilight Zone marathon on SciFi (I will not use that god-forsaken "y").

In honor of this blessed day, I submit for your approval a segment of the poetry series I wrote inspired by the work of the incomparable demigod Rod Serling (who would've been 87 this year):

Nightmare at Sea Level

Tonight she travels to the darkest corners
Everything intact except for her
Something isn’t quite right
Her memory ties a bow around the phrase:
“Let me take you home.”
The ribbon snakes down and comes undone by an unseen force
The neatness splashes away
Tonight she goes all the way
Allowing zippers
To converse with buttons
For once to hear the chime of fingernails against her wrist bones
And not push them away

But just out of curiosity,
Let
Me
Take
You
Home

Lights flick on like Polaroid
Gremlins scatter across the planes of her unkempt mind
“Did I do something wrong?”
Did
I
Do
Something
Wrong
She curiously stops her breath
Just to see if she can make this nagging feeling stop
If she were just to scratch at her temple
With the drag of a serrated Zoloft
Leave that as evidence that you should’ve taken the call
It’s not the seat; it’s the airplane
It’s not the memory; it’s the goddamn dream
It’s rubber hands and sandpaper faces
The choke of motor oil on the collar of a shirt softened by time, softened by her breath
As soon as Sun rises, Venus is visible draped in barely visible layers of steam and frost
She is alone in that assurance

“I have to go. You should too.”

She runs her fingers over the bite marks on her shoulder

She tells you she’s sick
Won’t you even allow the possibility?