The Wrongness You Cannot Prove

The Wrongness You Cannot Prove

Everything is fine. Everything is perfectly normal.
The sun comes up, the coffee brews, the routine is formal
and consistent and the world outside is doing what it does,
but underneath the ordinary is a constant, humming buzz

of wrongness that I cannot locate, cannot isolate,
cannot point to in a room and say: there, that is the freight
of the uncanny that has settled on my life like pollen,
the invisible contamination of the swollen

feeling that something fundamental has been changed.

I told the doctor. The doctor said anxiety.
I told my wife. She said I need more sleep, more piety
toward the ordinary, more trust in what the senses report,
but the senses are reporting from a world that has been caught

in a substitution, a replacement of the genuine
with a copy so precise that the copy is the discipline
of something that has studied us and learned the imitation
and deployed it with the confidence of a patient occupation.

The wrongness you cannot prove is the worst wrongness of all.
The shadow on the wall that matches nothing in the room.
The temperature that drops for no reason.
The moment when the background music stops
and the silence has a texture that the silence should not have.

I cannot prove it.
Nothing is wrong.
Everything is wrong.
And the wrongness is getting more comfortable
in the spaces where it lives.