I am made from wood
flown in from someone’s homeland
Someone’s family once stood where I was born
heavy feet packing down the earth like asphalt
Children crushed beetles
for the sound it makes
smiling with eyes closed
Mothers shook their heads
with a dense sadness most people call blood

Fathers dug and clawed my roots
to stick wooden posts into my flesh
packed wet dirt in the wound like a tourniquet
and hung signs written on the sides of arrows

I bled until the ground became my body
slept until my body became a cavern underground
My skin turned to salt

quartz that shimmered
when stray light made it in

Above me I could still hear digging
families trying to be familiar
and when the rubble came
crumbled over the holes
and made fertilizer of bones,
I laughed an earthquake
the ground now made of grounds.

I am grown now
I own arms and legs
I have makeshift hands carved from home
87 books on a shelf, folded clothing in trash bags.

But I am not any of these things
I am not the forgotten
I am not quartz,
I am not signs written on the shapes of arrows

I am the wood
flown in from someone’s homeland
Hidden in someone’s home

i thought for a long time
long enough to hear the ocean
being swallowed by all the salt
long enough to hear the earth speak
in its original dialect;
drawl'd, drawn out
patient as molasses.

i thought long enough that i could hear every sound
ever made.  Dead sounds
decayed as cicada shells
even the ones in the forest no one was around to hear.
And i thought
it sounded like a fire alarm in some basement down the street.

i thought for a long time
with my eyes shut
i thought for a long time
with a power drill pressed against my neck
i thought for such a long time my insides dried out
decomposed
and fermented my blood
into gas
trapped in fleshy canvas.
My corpse was a blimp now
and i thought about having nothing in my head.


and then i was weightless.
my dead self floating into space
like a christian *******
all i saw was objects
objectively
getting smaller
like collectibles over years
And all i could think was How does carbon taste?

and I could see the world
as objects standing next to other objects
standing next to nothing unless there's
an object.
Like something that exists
and that's it.
And that's that.


i thought for a long time
slackjawed
with carbon stains on my teeth
thinking without thinking about meaning
without meaning
writing down a dream
and throwing it under a bus before you read it.
being without meaning
is not the same as meaningless
how pointless a meaning feels
until you name it.
So i wrote down everything i could think of
that meant nothing to me
straight down like a list
and I called it a poem.
And suddenly i didn't have to think anymore.