Breaking Glass
By John Kendall Hawkins
A doctor once asked me why
stones should not be thrown
in houses made of glass.
They should, I replied
I said, they should
How else would one get out?
(Or think of Alice
at the core of mirrored shingles-
mind-menagerie, jungle of fragmented self-
ogling or smeared leers and everywhere eyes
with nothing to wipe away
distortions, but bags
and bags of broken stones.)
But he was not amused
and scribbled and smiled and conjectured
with his eyebrows. I glared
through raging eyes glazed with fear
and darkness all the way through
the Rorschach blots
building beaming rainbows to castles
and castles of refracted logic.
(Tears are constructed of such rainbows
and rainbows of such glass.)
Fingers pressed to the window pane
with the world whirring past
I wept cold as any stone trembling
all the way to the facility.
