There’s very little poetic about a dream of everyone abandoning you. I woke up in a sweat & had to check to make sure all of me was still there. Sometimes the things we do to influence the world make change like a supernova & sometimes they carve like glaciers. I’m playing with a bit of a poem right now—
We are young
& so we afford the luxury of likening our insides to stellar dust.
Having bits of poems living inside your head all the time makes it easier to feel familiar with words than with other humans. I don’t understand why so many of them go to such great lengths to make sure no dandelions grow in their yards. Poison the Earth to make it more homogenous & thus understandable. Make sure your neighbor does the same or else they aren’t your kind of person & maybe they, too, should be eradicated like the weeds they aid to flourish. I live a litany of things I’ll never be able to put on my resume—Names birds from inside the picture window. Counts the rings on fallen pine trees as a birthday present to Mother Nature. Memorizes dedications in books so the previous owners’ Book Souls live on. I’m not very useful, I guess, but I see more beauty in all of this than in the angular structures of society.
I love people whose heads are filled with cumulus clouds & the way the beach empties itself out in the winter (did you know the ladybugs all gather together to die?) & the way multiverse theory has become a tool to justify not living a fulfilling time on Earth & awe-stricken subdivision soldiers flapping their noiseless jaws at UFOs crashing to a halt near their Chevys & long eyelashes & the way old inevitably becomes new again & the magic you can buy for .90 at a rummage sale & spine shivers maybe being roving ghosts & cartography died with Columbus & there’s no way to know if you’re standing in the same place as the person in the apartment below you doing the same mundane thing in cyclical patterns of humanity so yes, go boil those noodles and then you’ll both take a seat in your linoleum kitchen chair and blow on the first bite but never say hello when you’re in the front hallway & the fuzz we wake with wedged between our teeth & the cogs of the Ultimate Machine which oils our joints to move by bells.
