birthday

i am early onset gum disease,

mouthfuls of pink spit lining the ceramic sink.

i am enough to warrant concern but not enough

to change.

i am skin stretched tight as a drum

with a living thing trapped inside,

stretching scars into its elastic prison.

i am ***** evaporating on suburban pavement

and the halo of litter around a garbage bin.

i am the stickiness of salt water drying on skin,

dribbling down and down and down.

i am the sensation of growing too old too quickly, of a rip in the seam of a shirt you once loved, loved, loved.

i am a nobody that is everybody.

i am so crushingly common and so

******* singular and i am the terror you feel

when you think of this.

i am lowercase i and capital I and grammar tables and the volumes of modernist poetry.

i am the twinge you feel when they speak his name

and hers and the ones who are just faces living in the corners of your mind.

i am touched and taken and drowning in liquids turned amber and sweet. i am gluttony and those six other sins which have never seemed so deadly.

i am speaking for myself, and i wonder if others speak for me.

i am nurture given living form. a product, a creature, a many-limbed thing.

i am all repulsion and vile intrigue. i am the

hall of mirrors and body cut in two. i am gemini sighs and red skin flaking free.

i am a half of a whole of a half that is

tired of completion and its worship.

i am a pilot, a lookout on the highest point. i am cracked lenses and falsely tripped alarms. i am the things that frighten then grow dim.

i am twenty and i am nowhere. and i am a living time capsule of things not worth remembering.

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