what am i doing here?
#1
Boiling. Water bubbles like plastic.
Early signs: your thoughts two
steps behind your foot. A callous
what am I doing here?
Filter paper in clear cups. The brew,
granules—round, rough; palatable,
once smoothened. A twice removed
reality. That’s how it starts. Then,
you watch paid videos to fill
holes in yourself that you didn’t dig.
You were handed the shovel and the
ground around was too beautiful for it.
Poetry sometimes makes itself ugly
before eating itself whole, outside in.
First you reject the plastic,
light exchanging—absorbing,
emitting—stars on your childhood
ceiling. Last, you burn your tongue.
Looking up, it’s all clinical white.
#2
Time. Sometimes arrives a little late,
gathering speed, rushes by without
human mercy. Stopping, only for a
second—the second before a wish
is made. I am impatient, spilling my
stilled time on every second need that
leaves me unfulfilled. I wish I didn’t
put my fist in my mouth so often.
I delude myself on all the shooting stars
I haven’t seen. Free-falling from the sky,
so far from reality, that smokey light trail
and I share something familiar. Our time
that expires in a breath, maybe. One
shakes the universe and I stand humbly,
humanly in the chaos. What am I doing here?
I was planted, here. Purpose and all. To keep
track of my minutes and count my wishes
in plucked eyelashes. After all these years, I just
see smoke in my night sky. Time has never
stopped, not a single wish has been made.
#3
Empty. Just a vessel carrying
human noises from head to paper,
That world to this? I ask questions
and pray they go unanswered.
At ten I wrote my first postcard.
At twenty one, in the post office,
I am not here. I am a five-word long
text message, a completed email in
the draft, a receding voice on the end
of a phone call I didn’t want to make.
Losing touch. Losing, licking the back
of a thirty paise stamp. My currency
is no longer in circulation. I want to be
irresponsibly here and irresponsibly
there but everywhere is no place to be.
The message, the question, no longer sticks
me back whole. What am I doing here?
Can I ask for a thought recorder to be taped
to my head next? Before I ask to know how
much of me is digitally preserved, I will let
the dust settle around me just a little longer.