The air was thinner, stiller these days when the world woke up and didn’t start running without legs, wheels spinning so quickly. Today it felt like park bark and empty air, freshly cut. I wake up craving cold pumpkin from a can, mixed together with nuts crushed into thick paste. Leathery clots cut from the ground whipped into an orange cloud.


I’ve been checking all these boxes, day and night. There was something in the air I grew up drinking, that manufactured things from the inside. Harvesting a pesticide smile, some genetically modified look in my eyes. Selecting for bright colors, no bruises. Taut skin. Artificial perfection. Like the sweat on my skin glittered, and if I just stayed floating with my feet, don’t touch the ground, they would love me. They would come home and say my name. Pluck me soon. Un-natural selection. If I put the ball in the net, if I showed up on time, if I kept walking up that staircase that seemed to be growing taller and steeper, the more people would have eyes on this body of mine that somehow managed to do everything right for you.


But in the way this father of mine disappeared into an old cave, so would I. This will to get it right would come for me. A descend from the platform to build something in hiding. I wondered about the way I didn’t change at all but just seemed to turn inside out. With my organs flush to the world, I crave a new name to conceal me.


What did the still words want to say? The ones that appear on the days when the sky isn’t ripping in two, but slowly melding together, like bubbly clouds with a thick buttery stitch.


The days when the spirit of you dwells inside your body rather than floating around the house or through the town. The days when your attention rests in front of you and inside your fingertips. The way the breath that enters you seems to have a life of its own.


For just this morning, to feel life on earth take its time. Like a petal unfolding. Slowly coming to rest on my chest like a child. Where the beat of a heart and a breast rising and falling, like a wave of ocean skin that quenches our infancy.


I thought all the words I had been collecting on folded pages for so long would be the ones to sing the tune of the meadow. But those inky glyphs rip me from this moment, where my eyes go where they want to go and rest upon some memory of holding you softly in my arms.


In last night’s dream, things were not what they seemed. Like an orchid in a wooden room. And a rumble of clouds folding together to create a large balloon. Things were not what they seemed.