Welcome to the second volume of Quickwords. Let’s do some digging.
| Under |
| Trodden by bare feet that irreverently appreciate its chill Soft in the role of the reigned who, with knowledge of inevitable victory, refrain Lapped faintly by the warming rays that we prefer to take It gives the same mercy that I give the dust that floats in the air beyond my eyes I do not know how I ended up here Torn, frayed maps on beige, freckled parchment give me a how but never one great enough They explain to me my path in the same inadequate way that a substitute teacher explains that i is an imaginary number, the square root of negative one, but omits why that makes it imaginary Perhaps everything is Perhaps I mistook the stains on my shoes for dirt gathered in my run Not in my fall Perhaps I mistook the warmth around me for the light of the sun Not the embrace of the earth When the clouds appeared and mired the ground, I failed to see myself slip And as mud coursed over my body, I remained staring at the narrowing gap between the clouds Then there was a point in my sinking when I could no longer see all the soil piling above me I discerned its presence only by its suffocating weight Temperature became a factor irrelevant Or perhaps indetectable Time vanished where I could no longer see the journey of the light Where my chamber alluded, eluded, the dark of a seductive, forbidden void I am under, and I am trapped in freedom Freedom of a different flavor than what my tongue has acquired but perhaps a new taste necessary for a different growth To consider one’s self a singular seed, I now believe, is naive I am a trellis crafted into the shape of a man And as I lay here, in the murky, cold, dark, with a number of my unsprouted seeds Finally, they begin to germinate |
| Dirty |
| Break from the ground and wash it off of yourself Where you’re going, it’s best to not look dirty I wonder Our gentle green stems become rigid brown trunks So many of us wear the colors of the soil The irreverence. |
| Smaller |
| Sometimes I think about what it would be like To live the life of the sapling sprouting from the earth Being a modest, miniscule part of an innominate world Each granule of soil would be enormous to my nonexistent eyes Each fallen leaf from my elders would be humbling Each bug an animate citizen of a natural empire Each raindrop a lake gifted from the sky Each day of vivid sun a lifetime of unmeasured time There would be an indeterminate peace in my life My perspective would find comfort, see the things around me as normal The soil and leaves and bugs and raindrops and sun Everything would seem normal, relative to me So sometimes I think about who or what thinks about what it would be like To live the life of a simple human growing up in an ordinary world Who knows a different soil than the sapling that they imagine but, in the inevitability of it all, imagines a smaller life Unthinking of the beings to which it has the smaller life Sometimes I think about that |
