willful nomad

i think too much

why am i always so hellbent on heartbreak?

ah yes,

that was the day i was convinced
that nothing existed.

two days later i thought i'd figured out
where god came from.

i spent the night reading
someone else's poetry.
i drank it in line by line and,
pencil in hand,
sketched myself an image of
someone i might know,
or someone i might have known.

the image was far from perfect,
but then again, so was the poetry.

i left my boots inside your door
before i even asked to come in;
someone told me a hundred years ago
that this house was mine.
he whispered it down a line of white on
white until it reached me and mine and i
left my boots inside your door
because i didn't think i had to ask to come in.

i is.
i is legion.
i is legion ever chatter
wading through the clatter water
shatter shatter shatter shatter
shatter shatter shatter shatter

stare

because i is legion.

i have started sleeping in
the middle of our
bed again.

though on its own no authority,
the mirror informed me:
you will never be a dancer.

people paint these pretty word pictures
and call it poetry,
all the while believing that
language is glass--
precious and transparent--
and paper an ordinary frame.

i've tied my heart to a kite string--
glass-laced and razor sharp--
and flown it out for all to take their turns at.
i fly my kite proudly, its brightly-coloured paper
soaring, strung with invisible teeth above
cracked ground, concrete, and innumerable heads.

take your shot, try me cries that bright paper,
joyful and defiant, its laughter an effort to conceal
the distance between itself and my hands;
it takes stock of power lines and other ghosted kites,
ever conscious of its precious cargo.

while my heart flies tenuous and triumphant
i can only guide the string,
hope for solid winds, skill, a little luck i
hold my breath and watch.

i don't yet understand
vengeance.

now there's a beast i thought i'd slayed
years ago. i guess it got sad,
came back for a visit.

where the hell is that ticking coming from?
if this is someone's idea of a joke,
i'm not laughing. i'm not laughing.

my fingers imprint you;
traces of memory fire like
synapses over rippling skin.

pressing into,
impressions
the only way i can leave
a piece of me in you:

a sensation,
a synapse firing over rippling skin.

for once the hallway in the
apartment i live in smells
like my cooking.

wave me blank-faced eyelid
pivoting on silence.

bathe me in process.

swaddle me in scathe but don't expect to
save me;

i'll come back to you...

wax peels onto paper in skidding stuttering starts,
ripped from its cylindrical origins and applied
with the care and consideration known only by
those with a child's concentration.

the medium of experimentation,
understood before knowing is known
and waged without apology before pride and
perfection leave their own marks on the artist.

colour is real; stubby fingers bend crayons to
wills that don't yet know shame in this first grasp,
this first expression of the symbolic.

i'm not afraid of my own shadow,
i'm afraid i am my own shadow.