No palms dolled up the tedium, no breathing wind.
No problem was the buzzword then, their way to go.

In truth, my case was black as sin, a thing to hide,
In that they feigned to find me sane, so not to know.

Someone brought in a medium. Anathema!
Some clown sewed up my eyes, he said it wouldn't show.

Confusing hands with craze, they howled, "Let's cut them off."
Confusing, too, their spies, my lies without an echo.

Time and again they stitched my mind with warp and woof.
Time pounded in my ruby heart, doing a slow,

Slow dim-out in that lupanar, slow take, slow fade,
Slow yawning like a door. "Hello," I said. "HELLO."

There, flung across the room between inside and out,
There must have shown itself to me. . .an afterglow.

With such a blaze to celebrate where centuries meet 
With time itself, how could I hesitate? Although

Still trapped in the millennium I knew I had 
Still time to blow some kisses. Look up, there they go!

From A Table of Content by Dorothea Tanning. Copyright © 2004 by Dorothea Tanning. Reprinted with the permission of Graywolf Press, Saint Paul, Minnesota. All rights reserved.