villanelle w/ anxious thoughts
       

please do for me a kindness
I require you near, softly as software.
my brain misfire, this mental illness.

I trash the household knives—hideous,
coruscating into the waste basket, the serrated
glinting, too much. I saw them jabbed, unkind

and hazardous in my eye's puncta. my own impulses,
manic. I take to rosé cider and naps, ever so scared
of myself and others. please refuse me the machines. it is

my compulsion to search-engine, seek the incubus.
I type, I like to frighten me with diseases, I dare
to see cardiac event, asphyxiation, viscera outside its rind.

I despise the web, know of what it's capable—distress,
apprehension, long sobbing over a polycarbonate carapace.
don't you think I would make a happy animatronic, never ill

but operational, functional automaton, my skull—one of stillness?
the knives glare sullen in the can, under pink lady apples, price tags, hair
follicle. they scrape there, pleading me to do their bidding, the peeled eye. can
I abide this and how long? this gripping neurosis, this never-desired, this vicious.

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Copyright © 2020 Emily Corwin All rights reserved
from Sensorium
University of Akron Press
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission