i’m wearing the clothes
of a thousand years
putting on one shirt
after another;
one pair of pants
after another;
and it is safe,
and it is warm,
in an immobilized
smothering
kind of way;

i’m sinking into softness
that the world might recede
and the echoes from the empty well
don’t sound so loud in the darker nights
as the knock about these walls
like laughter