Relit

Our lives have been lived,
bodies changed,
candles burned and relit,
thoughts formed in cycles,
seasons,
snow ball fights and rivers swam,
fields found and favorite shirts worn thin,
forgetting so much, a compendium of words.
This place is a shelter, an opening
in what was walked away from.
Five year old emails
to grandparents that no longer live.
Six year old emails
to the girl who changed the life
you had.
Letters and notes, pictures,
paintings, poems,
parts of parts
of parts.
Sweaters lost beneath the bed,
shoes destroyed in forests of
fondness,
rocks skipped across ten thousand
miles of memories, getting smaller,
gaining distance,
slowly sinking
beneath the surface
of lives lived.
Broken bones, fractured hopes,
torn between doing and done,
moving on or moving in.
Poems are plaster casts of
the intangible beauty
existing beyond our
ability to truly share
the feeling of
"alive."
We're bound in them,
and deleted,
torn, trashed, tossed,
dismissed, dismantled,
edited, repurposed,
disposed,
and found.
We're bound in
lives lived,
binding in us
life of others
changed and
relit.

Natural Selection

Calculated.

Most of it is anyway,

after that moment of discovery

what some people call a first breath,

and others suppose it's the beginning of life

but the rest of us haven't been convinced yet

that we aren't really living amongst our own murderous

tendencies.

DOB, timed, stamped, and registered,

most of it is anyway,

and after that it gets really weird,

I mean,

it gets weird in this sort of

"out there in the world"

kind of way,

you were once apart of something,

now it's numbers, ideas of being, ideas of not being,

and actually not being.

But now it's mostly unexplainable,

bubbles in bubbles exploding reabsorption,

disintegrating reconstruction, like

the kind that weighs on you late at night

when enough wasn't enough and it's all

hidden away somewhere in that small

shirt pocket, right in front of everyone's

eyes, but you're a great distraction, maybe

the greatest one you'll ever be able to

present to the world, a card trick.

It'll be that way, we'll all be that way 

for each other, card tricks, shuffling ourselves

into new decks of disappearing acts,

blowing away in the wind.

It's mostly unexplainable because

it's mostly uncontainable, forgetting

diverging, selecting for and against

worth or unworth. 

The environment creates and 

destroys you.