My Place?

The happily unsettled question, my place in the world?

More readily answered by affixing an imaginary, sentient billboard behind the forehead.

Although heavy to sustain, it lightens the load and clears the mind, becoming bolder lettering for the underneath content soul.

Fear not, nor be ashamed of the bare billboard even if pride or confidence breaks free from the flesh in words by way of the mouth.

It's set tidily above, with the world in its belly of the elements.

Time is its feet. The more the billboard stands, the lighter its relation to the soul. The heavier, more pronounced its steps become in lockstep with the soul in this sandy world.

So that is why the existence of an imaginary billboard is a threat to this world.

After all, this existential billboard, hewn into the flesh, is extended cousinry to the lasting elements of water, soil, and the sky incorporating characteristics of the indelible soul.

Each becomes a character in tandem. Then there is the introduction of pain, presumably and falsely categorized like graffiti defacing the billboard.

In that plastering over the billboard, the will can wane. If so, confusion and complacency are cast onto stiff, popularized moving images instead of the fulfillment of developing still-life moving pictures for the advancement of the participant and the audience.

Then, the furrowed brow is a subtly-lit neon sign of inspiration for further achievement and shared advancement of private toiling to hoist and maintain the billboard's loving example.

Despite building a billboard in the sky of the psyche, it is subject to abandonment in favor of the conveniently all-sensory, meaninglessly empty billboards nearby.

But, the misconception is that a stable billboard, unpopularly unseen and unaccepted by the world, has no place.

That is not correct, only the folly of detached imagination, a hanging shingle, minus a second screw, loosened because of shoddy workmanship and poor maintenance.

However, the imagination is the only place that is real. The reality is that substance is temporal and closer to obsoleteness and, therefore, related to the imaginary, a mirage.

It will rust. The flesh will rot.

The celebrations, the parades mined in the mind continue in the audience of the imagination.

Life's artistry of thriving and surviving is creating color from black and white, and black and white within color, giving moments definition and sustaining soulful virginity in the human mix.

Thus, a subtitled plank is then tacked under the billboard, containing the names of people who notice the sublime messaging regardless of their place or pain.

The bold letters on the billboard's mending amendments, received by others, are the translations crisscrossing cultures, languages, and experiences into shared commonalities, ignoring the contrarian mute, moving pictures around us.

Thereafter, the shared discovery of an elegant psyche and acceptance is a true and celebratory joy, a durable elastic subject of character and nothing else or less.

The message of the moving billboard is then passed on immutably, people discovering more about themselves and each other.

Love then is more believable and a trustworthy substance, taking on a moving and moveable form, progressing to dependable immoveability.

Then, in my place, the billboard becomes a portable, illustrated, two-sided sandwich sign worn on the shoulders.

Furrowed brows are the movement of stopping and starting points of question marks, directing attention away from the sign's body, a sigh of relief or release?

Love and pain are the question marks on either side of the interchangeable sides of the sandwich sign.

My place is within the slim space between the sandwich sign where I earnestly create calligraphy from life, not a personal menu, which is more joyous with each passing person stopping, looking, and questioning, regardless of whether my answer is understood or accepted.

Now, these forehead lines facing me become more than a personified question mark, but a period or exclamation point, a comma, or even overdue, in the expressively functional punctuation and meaning of life and love.

My place is not to have one at all.

Pain is the trim on each letter. Love is the inner character and space within words. Pain is a verb, and love is a noun, too.

Life is to come down off the billboard, unforming from given shapes. Love is to come out from under the sandwich board, promoting to a living, breathing question mark whose answer is unfailing love at the beginning and end of each thought, word, and action, forming a complete and coherent sentence as much as possible.

Love is a billboard. Life is a blackboard.

Love is our chalk, and life is our paint.

Each has plenty to shape the love into life and life into love from shapelessness, not from the given, imprisoning prisms of shapes.

That is why I need a place everywhere my feet are under me or not, quietness above the noise and rumbling crests above the waves, a place below the sky but above the cut-out paper clouds.

My place is so elementary within the elements that are the filaments in this world when I light the invention of the billboard, held up by the pylon-deep posts of experience.