Somewhere Here

If you live in this thin little place you will know that in it is held all the world.
You will know that what feels like a yesterday ago, 
some insatiable people made from a beautiful world of flesh, loving and protective, 
a prison through whose cracks you would be forced to experience life and it you. 
You will know that the air is metallic
like the chains of some forcefully forgotten narrative, and everything that grows does so out of the quicksand of the earth, which works always against it.
You will know that vivacity trembles in fear of degradation and the power of some self-ascribed superior who has beaten into it the morale of an inferior. 
So it travels here like some house guest. 
Nibbling at the crumbs of another’s feast, folding and stacking to the liking of a stranger, and longing for the rights to its own home once again.  

You must walk quickly in this place. The paths get narrower by the breath and all who idle will lose their way.
You cannot stop to smell roses or pause to hear the hummingbird’s song, for there are no flowers and there is no melody. The roads here are lined with nothing but trees. Bare trees of winter whose furled branches are extended to you
looming like the skeletal fingers of your mother’s mothers.
Oh how they love their daughters,
so Strangely, but they love.
How they pull down your skirts and button up shirts to keep you safe from the eyes of Wolves.
And when the walking goes limp,
how they blow in the wind and cast shadows that scare you and tell you you’ve sinned.
So in this place you must constantly run. 

This place is waking to a hesitant reflection. Full lips inflated from a dormant restlessness,
curls turned to kinks from rubbing up against a pillow, eyebrows “wild” curving this way and that,
dark irises, plain 
without cosmetic embellishment.
Hesitant because your reflection is not you.
It can’t be.
Every night spent deep in the caverns of your mind, pondering things you are told the being standing opposite you could never begin to touch.
In a world where two and two can make five, knowledge is always out of reach 
There is none in this thin little place, so they say. 
You have been mistaken, you were mistook. 
So you, a prisoner, are forced to feel every thought you’ve ever known banging against the walls of this asylum. 
Everything here is a contradiction
Forces play tug-o-war, pulling and pushing every which way
so that your equilibrium has become what others might call imbalance. 
But you’ve known nothing other than this constant questioning, this knowing and unknowing.
To know anything other means not to be here, but anywhere else. 
You ask yourself
Are you in this place because what you feel and what you are oppose each other? Or
—are what you feel and what you are in opposition because you are in this place?
Your consciousness bounces off the sides of its enclosure because you know the answer, 
you always have
But you are mistaken. 

You remember days as a child in this place.
Warm days upset only by a cool breeze or a drop of rain whose signaling of storms ahead was regularly overlooked.
You remember 
This is my home, you think
this is where I live, you know 
But how can you love what is polluted with the desires of others
corrupted by those claiming good intent but whose only goal is self-promotion.
So here you find yourself in a constant state of war
it feels like millions of hands pound on this warm little box
millions of hands against cardboard—firm 
but with every punch an edge folding in on itself
in order to absorb the blow
or collapsing some part of itself in order to stretch to an external pull Some try to leave this slither of a place.

Some wash away the nativity in their features and squeeze their bodies into shells that are not meant for them. 
They find new troupes to emulate, new ways to be encapsulated 
How they are marveled!
The intellect was a danger, but these are entertainers. They become the stars in the sky,
the constellations of someone else’s story.
They have run from one prison to another, only now their interjections become the object of shameless humor. 
Screaming into an endless void
they shake with the vigor of an outraged prisoner, but perhaps 
they are simply
Shimmering

Being in this place is not a choice, it is a destiny. 
It is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
And so this place is everything everywhere
its bounds resembling those of the universe.
It is the earth and the sky and all that is packed in between, 
but most importantly what it is 
is here 
in this thin little place called skin.
You will go across the cosmos but never leave, and that’s what it’s like living in a place like this
A skin like this. 
You’re always here.