Where Are My Glasses!?

Seeing what they’ve seen and knowing what they know,

I fear them:

my fourteen pair of 99-cent-store reading glasses

are planning an escape

Ridiculous you say?

By what means could they survive me

in the outer world beyond the bridge of my nose?

I remind you: They leave with virtually every bit of

intellectual property I own;

and they know things about people that even I

shouldn’t know....

My friends will receive

blackmail notes from them,

burnt into scraps of paper

by redirected, magnified sun rays.

I must stop this

before it goes any farther.

I must beat them at their own game.

What they’re doing currently is

(they think)

“conditioning” me.

They hide.

I look in the four or five

key gathering places,

but no pair is visible.

I sort through piles of paper matter

and cannot find them....

They think, “When we pull it off–

when we go over the top–

he’ll think it’s just that we’re playing again.”

I am alone in this room.

I cannot see what I hold in my hand

–and I can feel twenty-eight little eyes

watching me.

So it will do the unthinkable:

I will employ brutality, torture...

(I am not a signer of the Geneva Convention, damn it!)