Four Day Clothes

These are browns and blues and grays.  They are soft and smell of salt and garlic and the din of rooms.  These are fitted and bent around me and they are skin.  They are keeping my attention and they beg me not to move very quickly and they slow me and have me lay down again, leaning away from a nausea that haunts my belly and the ache in my chest from crumpling into four days.  Four days of retreating and forgetting useful information.  Four days of hiding in clothes and blankets, greens and browns and grays.  Seeing the real danger and backing away into the rough wave of sickness that came upon me and drowned me to the rooftop, a bed under a blank sky.  The television glows colors into the dark and cluttered room.  The colors are dependable and take me from the presence of the blue and brown and gray, the knitted skin, the shell the skins colluded.  Time slips with no effort beneath me, time rushes, flooding away the numberless works that sat undone.  There is slow breathing deep underneath it, some small light filtering though the fathom above.  The weight of a sea bending in wind above.  I close heavy eyes and sing a picture, something bright, till I come up for real air.