you know the judging eyes
You know the judging eyes, they shred you. You need not see them precisely quivering to maintain focus on you or your shadows or your wake of errors and failures and misperceptions. You see the eyes blankly cast into the dark rooms of afternoon, and still into dusk and as the city lights awaken all about they are glazed in fluorescent glimmers, dry and unblinking, fully white. In all the days all the open eyes can scour your footsteps and peripatetic dreams. In the dark you need not see the eyes to know that they loom. They address all facets of your descent and departure, your progress, your productivity, your worth and contribution, your shape, the questions and the motivations, your growth, your erasure, your punctuality, your collections, your deposits and throwaways. Her gaze bears down and drives you closer to the earth each night, grinding you into nothing against the asphalt and dropping you into corners crushed from the burden. You are broken into pieces and her eyes see them as they float away. You remain kneeling before her glassy eyes and you remain hurriedly stepping away from them and laying in the dark and sitting behind a counter forgetting. She sees the past admissions falling away from you in clouds of dust, in sweat that falls on the table. In all the days of all the eyes in every moment you never cease to be broken apart, yet you never outrun the big clumsy body that has wasted so many dreams and footsteps. Even in the moment, between the flutters of your own cycling consciousness, they record, disappear for an instant, and taunt ceaselessly.
Out of the open vastly shifting day you drift into a divided city. Things become solid in the dark. The past becomes tangible. Guilt, suspicion, scrutiny, and uselessness become forces that you are cast adrift upon to meander through the night. You yearn to sink down into the mud, the real earth beneath, solid and immersive and opaque. Her eyes pass you from one moment to the next, delivering you into new situations, new tests and new obstacles, but float empty themselves beneath you, never filling a place or failing with you. You fail to sink. The surface of recent memory is unbroken. As you drift across it, the spots where you have fallen, spilled, given up, cheated, intruded, hidden, decayed and languished, but away from which you coast, leave inlets for scrutiny to fill, the eyes of others, her eyes flooding your past and eroding it into wandering islets and spits that you will never find again in the backed up stagnation of the trapped tides. The moments that fall away, into the soup, swim suspended beneath you always, always rubbing amongst one another, borrowing and infecting, and losing you with their foreignness.