I run laughing into night
You try to follow but
I’ve taken flight

I run laughing into night
You can seek but
I’ve dimmed my light

If you've got the vision
I'll be in sight, but

I'll always
Run laughing
Into night

What we idealize
We condemn.
Strip it from the backs
Of those we oppress,
Notwithstanding ourselves.
Cram it in a box marked “DO NOT TOUCH” -
A false preservation.
Fasten wonder and difference in
Wax-body museums.
The overture of youth, displaced.
Forcibly removed and
Compartmentalized until
Homogeneity reigns supreme
In the halls of collective memory.
Admonishment replaces admiration.
The administration demands -
How dare anyone have what
We stole from ourselves?

In all the pieces of past bits in
Collections and recollections
Every painting and every map
Intentions in all the broken plants
and ripped paper
brought to fullness;
A mirror

The footsteps we heard
Back and forth across
The familiar floor, up the steps &
Through the door
Where our father lies sleeping
When we both know
We were not dreaming

“Where are you?” She shouts as she runs down the hallway.

“Go away!” He says, cramped behind a closet door.
“Where are you?” She knocks on the door to the room.
“Go away!” He says, and sneaks off to the parlor. 

“Where are you?” She says gently, slowing her pace.
“I am not here” He says, as she closes the front door behind her.
She sits on the steps and lights a cigarette.
Each exhale as heavy and thick as the silence that fills the house.

Tracing the holes on my peely-paint wall
My fingertips ask what’s behind
So I pull at the edge & it all falls apart
With more peely-paint holes inside

Maybe we are full of ghosts
And therefore, nothing, but
Data
Patterns in brackets and matrices of Proof
buried in the dunes of our own topography
Where lies
Everything
That gives us shape.