The Looking Glass Self

I.

One year, a procession of cardboard boxes,

the hereditary lances I discover on my tongue.

Barbed reaching for not my milk in not my refrigerator,

still bleeding in the doorway

of the concrete depot that houses everything

I wish to burn and resurrect in turns. I witness myself

becoming who I think you think I am; I train myself

on a jingle of reminders:

  water is the only element that reflects light

  back at its beholder,

  the center of the earth is traversable by breath,

  it is none of my business

  if a pendulum's nature is to touch each boundary

  again—

  again—

  again.

I am always reaching towards

the past, finding it's a junk drawer jammed midway

on its track, that there is a lot inside I can't bring myself

to throw away.

II.

I find evidence of trespassers. A path has been trod

through thorny overgrowth and creaking bamboo

to arrive at my bedroom window. Are they my

thoughts? A horror, the familiarity; yet

they made home where I would not.

The average hummingbird weighs less than a nickel.

I commit myself to the joy of the moon, to knowing what I like

in a neighborhood, to carefully composting the detritus of opinions

that have trespassed upon me.

III.

Here, the years fold into each other

  like an

  origami fortune teller.

Each paper flap

  conceals a younger story,

  eight ways to seek.

IV.

Wherein I learn that

speaking a litany of no's is

one way to know my own heart. There

is a sweetness revealed by the novice mind's

proclivity to over explain its process. I let

my no's undress themselves.

V.

At night I wonder if I could gather

aliveness from memory's

red orchard, preserve enough joy

in jars to last each liminal winter

I have left.

The memories are sentiment and skin.

I try

to sum them to the feeling of filling a page—if ideas

could spark in the absence of bodies, if aliveness was only

the idea of bodies, I could be

the orchard.

VI.

Each morning, I wait until the kettle

expulses

a new cartography of steam.

It is either true that survival precludes devotion

or devotion is survival. I am sure that the lie

is a warning.

VII.

A woman invited me and six other strangers

to her home. Enclosed by a family of

Sequoias, we learned to see what was good

in our writing. Cocooning in

cream and lilac fabrics

we lifted our mugs

from knotted wood tables and drank

the apothecary warmth of each others' praise.

Sensory details!

Our cohort finished as eight boxes on a screen,

sipping tea from a quarantine of living rooms,

wondering our uncertainties out loud.

VIII.

At the border crossing between selves,

a clerk dressed in disinterest slides a form

across the counter.

  Choose:

  Identity, or art?