So much influence
and quietness

Do I make sense?
I think not.

Even my own words don't make much sense to me.

My eyes see.
My brain analyzes, collects evidence to assure me of my existence
in this hallway,
on this grassy field,
throughout this dimension.

My steps remind me of
my weight,
my mass,
and my movements through the air,
thick with swarms of friendly and unfriendly,
magnetic creatures.

Quickly, they attach,
they swarm—the feelers,
the projectors of reality.

I sense we move backwards through time,
too many eons to count,
too many mistakes to fix,
and too many breaths taken, unwillingly.

Conscious only to the level of awareness,
but not awake enough to really see past the fog—
I see myself cluttered with thoughts of self acceptance,
material, and form, dense and crowded.

Easy to get distracted, easier still to pretend you're just sad,
easiest to fixate because we were planted
into these animal clothes,
and we just
can't
help
it.

Dense and dumb but also beautiful with flaws,
and beautiful with limited capacity,
and so tender and sweet.

You can't fault us;
I can't fault me;
so we just exist.

Trying to do better,
eyes fluttering, navigating,
swimming through creatures,
and feeling forgotten, and lonely,
and blind to the interconnected web.

So instead,
I count days
and live in boxes
and eat sweet, frozen green grapes
and days pass backwards
until I am born again.

Yesterday the sea urchins spoke to me
in their soft plant language—
that is, in that soft plant voice of theirs,
which crept up my limbs,
found my tender spots, sneaky tendrils,
and tinged my skin with violet.
 
Yesterday, too, the moon jellies touched me with their oral arms—
that is, with their blackberry-stained fingers,
which flooded my ears, settled in the cochlea,
put me in an eternal slumber. 
 
That night I had vivid dreams,
and like some girlish doe,
I fawned over the impermanence,
the fragility of "human."
 
All I could see through the thick haze
was the messy lagoon-sea of intimate emotions,
and I discovered the true algae nature
of our marbled, purple universe.
 
Languidly listening
to the lingering language of your tongue, 
half-delirious, lugubrious, mouthful,
I dreamed
that you would linger longer.
 
That your peach-sweet and honey kisses 
might become lethargic and lay low, 
lazily love me.

You stole me away,
brought me to the Bitter Blue,
where only mermaids go,
showed me the complexities of sugar-spun webs.

And when we hunched over,
squinting to better see the intricacies,
 I glimpsed your milky arachnid lashes.
 
We peeled poppy petals
and made garlands of lilies.

And when I fell into nettles,
you licked away the trichomes.

We turned up big, breathing stones,
crushed up cicadas.
 
I fell asleep in a bed of gardenias, 
and in my slumber you
spoiled me with jewels of cosmine
and told me even the radiolaria are listening.

that hot air circulating through empty spaces between limbs,
licking sticky skin

that night air smell

golden skin and salty beads of sweat

you, a constant summertime year round

I think of us as planets.
We circle around each other’s orbits infinitely.
We are pulled into the same story with each incarnation,
but refined more purely with each succession.

I have not, and will not glimpse the presence of our Creator in any being as intensely as in you.

After those hours spent swallowed up by your eyes, I was afraid that I would wake in the morning, and it would all have been a dream.
In fact, I am still vaguely afraid.
Do not be a mirage.

I found myself in a bathroom. I couldn't tell which reality was real, and when I looked down at my hands, I noticed they were translucent and disappearing quickly.
I ventured further into the dream because it felt safe, and I sprang out into the backyard at home.

Everything was so technicolor, so hyperreal and fluid. I said to myself, this is what it would have been like if everything was perfect.

I did some gymnastics on the table and ran by the pond. It was all so vivid, and the ripples on the water’s surface were luminous. I ran inside, and said to my mother, “I want go to Japan,” and she said, “We're going soon, in one week.”

All of the creative work is...
meaningless unless it is made with you in mind.

I’ve seen you everywhere, in all of the small spaces
and large spaces alike.

A hologram
Everything located inside of you, loud and all at once