☀ Today's Poem:"Secret Channel" Mikko Harvey

When you realize you are only a subplot
in the story the day is telling, you are
devastated; it would have been better
to be everything or else nothing,
but on your left front tire
the valve stem's cracked. She is running
downtown to buy a replacement
while you are in charge of covering
the leak with Scotch tape, to prevent
the air from bleeding out
completely. You drift from room
to room, not remembering where
you keep the Scotch tape. If only
you had taken a more thorough inventory
of your home prior to this moment,
this moment might have been avoided.
But your left front tire is bleeding air,
even now, while you chastise yourself.
If you don't find the Scotch tape soon
you will be sort of fucked, because
you live in the north, where the roads
are ice and snow. It's the sort of place
where mice find your apartment
desirable in the winter, worth risking
everything for. They embark on voyages
into your kitchen around 11 p.m.,
where occasionally you happen
to be standing motionless, silently
sifting through the minutiae of some
rhetorical stance. So motionless, in fact,
the mouse mistakes you for furniture.
You watch the mouse climb into your sink,
where it finds nothing, but when it climbs out
it sees you seeing it, and freezes.
The loudest sound in the room
is the wall clock's beating heart.
You and the mouse are both scared
in ways that are separate but connected
by the attention they pay to each other.
This attention forms a bridge, although
it is a fragile one no reasonable person
would dare walk across. It will collapse
the moment one of you turns away.