May 2019
I sit in the bushes, a burglar of imagery and a thief of colour, taking from daisies and TV screens for a paper transfusion,
A plastic cup paddles up to me, a puppy who is happy for freedom from its owner, and is asking for treats, so I give it a place on my page, a personification, and a promise of immortality,
Most of this is green, no matter the domain of life it occupies, green prickles, feathers, dewdrops, spindles, and leaves on branches broken,
Under the scuffed rubber of my shoes is bland, brown right now but so often grey, the grey of the city and the abiotic entities suspended by the things that walked before me, as it carries my name I assume it is me it remembers,
I have stared at the white-lighted sun for too long, but brief glimpses of red under that lady’s heels and hidden under petals still stand out among cool counterparts,
The trees are alive, the flowers and weeds and awful bushes I hide in too, even the rocks carry the life around me an integral part in an ecosystem, which makes me wonder why in my ecosystem I can be useless, and why I am still dying,
The sun feels good but I remember being taught it should feel bad because it illuminates everything, not just the melanocytes under my skin, but the plague that stretches across my hands because I can’t help but stay awake sometimes, so I bury it in my clothes to remain uncomfortable,
It is still amazing to me that moss can grow between pavement cracks under foot soles and under the pressure of the sky a little heavier than the people above it and still have biological diversity,
I have spotted death now, inevitably, black-cobwebbed hollowed out under six-framed sides to form a stomach for things to rot in, a home for the local housefly,
I wonder then, why, around me there are also flies,
Do a U-turn: its canine calamity and sixty degrees, I can see reckless joy manifesting under wild fur and soft paw prints, spreading happy and dancing like a parasite,
The fawning parasite travels, bringing news of the sunlight, through the cracks in the pavement like the blood vessels of the city, it is carried into the grey building from which we came, causing chaotically pent-up kids to diffuse,
That’s why I’m here, isn’t it, because the grey blood vessels lead back to the blood vessels of gray.
A plastic cup paddles up to me, a puppy who is happy for freedom from its owner, and is asking for treats, so I give it a place on my page, a personification, and a promise of immortality,
Most of this is green, no matter the domain of life it occupies, green prickles, feathers, dewdrops, spindles, and leaves on branches broken,
Under the scuffed rubber of my shoes is bland, brown right now but so often grey, the grey of the city and the abiotic entities suspended by the things that walked before me, as it carries my name I assume it is me it remembers,
I have stared at the white-lighted sun for too long, but brief glimpses of red under that lady’s heels and hidden under petals still stand out among cool counterparts,
The trees are alive, the flowers and weeds and awful bushes I hide in too, even the rocks carry the life around me an integral part in an ecosystem, which makes me wonder why in my ecosystem I can be useless, and why I am still dying,
The sun feels good but I remember being taught it should feel bad because it illuminates everything, not just the melanocytes under my skin, but the plague that stretches across my hands because I can’t help but stay awake sometimes, so I bury it in my clothes to remain uncomfortable,
It is still amazing to me that moss can grow between pavement cracks under foot soles and under the pressure of the sky a little heavier than the people above it and still have biological diversity,
I have spotted death now, inevitably, black-cobwebbed hollowed out under six-framed sides to form a stomach for things to rot in, a home for the local housefly,
I wonder then, why, around me there are also flies,
Do a U-turn: its canine calamity and sixty degrees, I can see reckless joy manifesting under wild fur and soft paw prints, spreading happy and dancing like a parasite,
The fawning parasite travels, bringing news of the sunlight, through the cracks in the pavement like the blood vessels of the city, it is carried into the grey building from which we came, causing chaotically pent-up kids to diffuse,
That’s why I’m here, isn’t it, because the grey blood vessels lead back to the blood vessels of gray.
