TRYING TO RETURN OR BECOME OR BE REMEMBERED
I notice the paths of fireflies,
the off-and-on-agains of magic insects,
in sex and out of place with everyone.
Keep in close and make the slightest movements.
Someone is watching if you’re perfect.
If all the worlds that exist found their special ways to you
and built together something massive,
universal,
larger than the living and all of those that have lived
would it still feel like pretending?
Dust is an apparition and grime is no one’s business
but god’s and his children’s –
whoever they are.
I am a nightmare someone had – maybe it was me –
before they woke up and finally accepted
that everything on Earth is real.
Or maybe I am a nightmare, sleeping through
someone else’s dream.
Touch my face. I have a texture like yours,
I am wax, a myth someone put a shape to, but
I still capitalize my name in the closings of letters.
I am leaning in because I think I can feel this now – again.
The old place in my sorrow that acts as the tranquil eye of my desire,
the restlessness and discontent of homogeny, processed, and packaged by routine necessity,
the damned insistence that I become amazing.
I am leaning in because somewhere on the back of my thighs blood has been stopped by the edge of my chair
and the building pressure has pushed some warmth, a little electricity, back into my heart.
And I can feel it in my cheeks
just beneath my eyes.
But I can’t feel my elbows.
But they are not aesthetic pieces of my anatomy. They function
but do not need to feel.
They are not human
They are not artists.
I am not artist, but I have no function.
What does that leave me?
What name do I have? What color
would someone truly great paint my eyes if I sat
for their one true masterpiece,
the single most important action they ever made?
Would they regret that I did not sit before them,
trying not to blink my blue eyes,
gray eyes?
My eyes are green. Or brown.
Later would I remember his name, or simply remember him as the artist who once painted me,
who will always love the memory of finishing me?
Touch a brush to my face. Give it texture.
I am not an artist who has a name for someone.
No one who’s changed my life will remember me
after I have finally disappeared.
I am not disappointed, but I feel lost.
I am trying to travel the lightning bugs’ path.
