after Tory Dent’s “Variations”

Then ask the cloud to enter through the screen.

Then ask the cloud to enter through the cave’s entrance of the screen into the broken living the broken living room.

Then ask the cloud to light up orange like tungsten light to light the edge of the forest, through which another world peers.

Then light the cloud with cannon fire, the cloud which entered in through your ability to forget and spread like 2am into your mind like YouTube rabbit holes like Nutella on toast. Pilot yourself through the cloud to see what baptismal rain accumulates inside it.

Ask the cloud to leave like friends when the talking gets too hard and screeches like an old AC belt through the fog. After the heart has emptied out into that lake which the brain deems the enemy, the world outside the body, let the folkloric rain begin, and dispense of your stash of broken umbrellas, usher your company out the door, stumbling, soaking, into the sun.

Then ask the cloud to enter through the scathed lens of your eye. Then shut the door and leak the cloud onto your pillow in the night.

And when the cloud returns in the morning mirror, brush your teeth and spit it out into the sink.

And when the cloud convinces you it has created a netherworld, which you now inhabit, which is laid upon the preexisting world like a thin layer of dust, like a new mist over the jagged, palimpsestic mountains, look at the mist only through the reflections in the eyes of passersby as it creeps behind you, down the avenue.

The next morning, wipe the dust with microfiber cloth from the surface of your laptop, the covers of your scattered library, and lay down awake in the hole your body clears in the air, and imagine your veins a tunnel to the dark center of meaning, the initial layer of the painting.

You are a like a human sleeping on a cold rock, you look like a human taking the shape of a cold rock, you are a cold rock trying to become a sleeping human, one step closer to the cave’s arched exit, lit by a dim red light.