i'll never pretend to understand,
from sand that tourists
take home in little
tiny bottles with seashells.
sometimes we spend too many
seconds staring at nothing.
once, we stopped on the side of
the byway. our mission:
georgia peaches, rustic sun,
bull god, vertically stretched legs.
i was born to ridiculously mimic
your actions,
like somehow if i believed what you did
we would share the same skin.
we were fishing for things we didn't understand
our pride bulged out like a bullfrog
whenever someone suggested our ignorance.
you were one thing
i could never
figure out
how to go about
taking you off the tip of
my tongue
never tasted fruit like this
like we were biting the flesh
of 'no'
like tonguing the seeds of something
we still dont know the title of
hold me to this
stretch of road where we saved
our last breath
to wish for the innocence
we used to be.
we never wished on time,
never wanted a reversal of being
because being
wasn't something we had a definition for
and if you lose that in your travelling backwards,
how then do you describe it when you long for it again?
there are plenty of poems i left
in gravelways on the road to tennessee.
i planted the seeds
by the cherry trees that
weren't cherries at all
and hoped for the color to seep in
and bite the insides of their cheeks.
i was left knee-deep
in a current that looked me over
and decided i wasn't enlightened
enough to sweep me under just yet.
there
i was born enough to want
to walk on my own,
but not bold enough for the consequence
of simple existence.
i could've taken something then,
could've learned from the people
who'd never seen people like me,
could've figured out from the
hand-touch
that there was more to the story.
could've listened to the bedsongs
in the cherry trees.
we were born from instances
we will never remember
but they'll spend our whole life
attempting to scramble to the surface
and breathe
bluefaced
until their lungs are filled
with windsong.
© 2009 Marcea L. Brown. All rights reserved.
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