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Jan 2012
Hey you
You on the corner of space and slow time,
With the Wednesday smile that looks like you stole it from a prankster
Are you for real?
Or are you that sidesteppin passerby
Who took two steps off the sidewalk and one into me
Took a knife to the inside of my skull
Wrote down a life I forgot wasn’t mine
Cause sometimes I’ll admit I can’t tell the difference
I’ve been throwin baseballs of the back porch of my soul
Since the day the monster under my bed grew teeth
Hoping for someone to catch up catch them and catch me too
I’ve been running since the day I met God on the banks of a backwards river
Spinning this world like a record played one too many times
Sk-sk-skipping across all the riffs we used to glide over like it wasn’t a sin
He and his pals foolin us for the fun of it
Burnin a driftwood fire just to watch the colors change
I traded in my bibles for a pawn shop prayer
Cause everyone knows that bookstores are just pawn shops
For ideas that people were too drowned to keep on drinking
To keep on keeping


Hey you
Imagine we became all the words we breathed
Out of fairytale pages turned cigarette papers
the night you became a constellation
Us, riding a magic carpet woven from strings
Stolen from Fate when she wasn’t looking
I’d never been one for shoplifting
But that night we made off like barefoot bandits riding on a broken hymn
With nothing but chains of laughter round our ankles
I, the night dancer and you, the day singer
And we two seeing both sides of the moon
Sing me the song that day sung the first time she realized
That the night was more than a coat her dad told her to wear
Because it was raining
The universe ringing with the words of convenience store philosophers
Things people are too scared to write anywhere but on the walls
Of public bathroom stalls so far from the city that
Blackberry picking still involves thorns
I wished I was an ant so that I could carry
Things that were bigger than me without breaking
So that my biggest worry would be microscope lightning
It wouldn’t matter if you only wore your turban on nights so cloudy you thought God couldn’t see you
Cause when’s the last time somebody judged an ant on their headwear?


Hey you
Sometimes when I’m with you I mistake myself for a queen
And right now I’m ruling these words shamelessly
My subjects whose only job is to grow fields of sunflowers in December just for you
Let it sink in
Let it be known that my physical transition fails to interrupt my meditation
That I’ve never known a dream that did anything but embroider the ether
The air between us quit smelling like a cinderblock romance
Your hands a kinetic ignition to my saltwater synapses
That connect in double-time to the electric current runnin from your heart to mine
If you’re just some sidesteppin passerby that took two steps off the sidewalk and one into me
It’s too late cause I’m dreaming of you like pumpkins in spring
I already burned down my fortress of forget-me-nots
When I tried to write your name with a side-split matchstick
I can still see you amidst a mountain of ceiling tiles and plywood floors
Closed doors that I knocked down because they wouldn’t open
You are a brick
I have no shovel
I have hands
Will you take them?
Written by
India Chilton
1.5k
   kara lynn bird and ---
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