Speak anything like a prayer and it is made sacred.
I cant tell who i am anymore and its exhilarating.
Life runs through me like a stitched thread down my body. Dragging pulling against the sin. The skin. Inconsistent symmetries of perfection.
Am i well if i am not declared sick? What if the flutter, the thump and hollow suction, the empty and irregular stillness stay my secret? What if i never tell? Can you see inside me? Will anyone?
A string of pain flashes in my toe. A stinging sliver. A single nerve rioting. I gasp and draw my impossible, invisible wings around my shoulders. Over my face a veil of feathers. It is nothing. It is just me.
if we balance and never fall
crest yet never break
inhale and never deflate?
Do we die?
Is pausing ever really staying alive?
If we stay when we could never leave are we still faithful?
Can life be held inside a seal? Or can posession only ever kill off vitality.
Can skeletons feel their fantom skin? Does no one else realize they have no right to touch anothers bones? Do they watch us pick up their pieces as we stand locked in our separated glass jar of time, the one they escaped. Yet linger around still to watch through all time? Turn the line and look straight down it and view everything as one moment. One dimension.
Can it be true that if there is time there is also not-time? Or perhaps its symmetry is imagined. A theory written on stained paper pulp which grew when fed the bones of dead people. Which made itself and was killed and sterilised and bleached white.
Not all the bones though. Sometimes the living collect the bones. Save them from their fate. Pause them. Keep them still, some call it safety.
If i didnt know better id call it kindness. This forcible haunting. Do their ghosts stick around? Watching students sketch them sitting in a public middle school in October of 1996. Still shaking off their downey fluff and preening their sticklike unopened quills. So far from their natural ends that they still breathe like its only ever a beginning.
Is it safety to be held outside of the world you deserve? Which is your birthright?
To be held captive in these scaffolds that once held hope and blood. Empty castles paused upon the brink of their destiny to tumble off a cliff. Suspended inexpertly, waiting for their next home.
Trapped when they should be molecules, elements in a thousand living cells. Making trees to make paper to carry ideas from the past to the future. They should be burning into carbon while regimes try and own someones soul. They should be joining all the other lives they are owed. Carried by the rain into the earth. Carried by the flush of mycellium to their new life. Eaten by a child. Settling in the childs bones and becoming one more person.
People write down memories on their ancestors. Every part of us had a past life.
i collect abandoned houseplants at night as i sleep. In some imagined house thats three times over in excess of my need. Too big and too much to keep. I take what i will myself to believe i can save. I save these living things which dont exist. Terrified of loss and losing and death. Wanting value.
