steal me from places, from other people’s glances
from cold soups and colder wars
passing sentence after sentence
in an avalanche of speech sounds with no commas
and a word order in which the object always comes before
the period and after everything else
steal me from a time continuum creased between my eyebrows
from who in blue blazes is making all that noise at
the rear of the audience after screaming blue murder
what if i don’t want to get out of my blue funk and get back to
what was it again?! maybe it’s just this dismal weather we’ve been
having the reason for my blues and maybe one day
i’ll stop bristling when i hear how beautiful i look in blue

steal me from a frantic search for answers, adjusting schedules, reciting
shopping lists by heart, estimating how fast to run to catch a shooting
star and driving through yellow and red lights, from two-dimensional realities
with the illusion of depth, from a plurality of overlapping sequences and
durations, steal me from conformity to facts and ideals of right conduct, from
exactness, last-minute kisses, and accepted values for quantities

steal me from myself

slow me down to a speed of
no beats per second and until all i see is
the uncontrollable laughter of the waves