Parts of me live in different places
Young Minds of Medium My Home
I was told some people are born lucky.
Perhaps — but then by consequence I realize, if true,
I find myself lucky to have been born.
I feel like parts of me live in different places.
As if some witch or wanderer snatched me up,
Laid me out in chunks, seven fingers and ten toes
In different places, and suddenly I came to life.
I was hardly a human being before doctors
Cut me open. They took from me my flesh,
As if my body is not the only thing I own,
I contain, in this world.
(i wonder;
where do those parts of my body live now?
tell me,
did you throw my fingers away?)
But years pass. You and I live with it, together
In that ghostly room, you feel it still.
The unbearable weight of nothing
Has you backed up against the door. Clear nights
Brought moonlight through windows. You’ll just
Sleep in the hallway for a while, I suppose.
(between me and you,
I let a demon
leave the attic and
he never came back)
But sometimes I forget where I am,
Imagine myself in that life again.
Luminous morning. Chilled air, perhaps,
Or more likely a lack of heat
Resonating right from the sun.
And when I believe I haven’t left,
It filters back in. Our couch. My voice
Circles the same corner as the days go by.
Fighting against that mortality, torn cloak,
That fickle thing, to keep myself alive.
And the uptick, the jibe in my chest,
As if the day, the night, wherever it is
I am by then, has only been a blur
Of something other than my own mortality.
(i can’t even
live in my own head.
they might take that, too)
We hear so much about what life feels like.
Right now, today, with the sun’s glow outside,
And cicadas that want as much as I do to believe
After 17 years, we must relinquish parts of ourselves
In order to grow,
It’s impossible not to want
To rest here, to savor the in-between, until you
Show up unannounced, again,
Knowing perfectly well what I think of you.
Inspired by Tracy K. Smith’s “I Don’t Miss It” (her work rocks!). Thanks for reading. ❤
