mountainous
The mountains will always rise up before you as
castles to be crested, proving the gold in your veins,
cast on the earth merely for you to crumple into crowns.
They will always rise up before you, for their roots
run deeper than your ambition, their arms spread wider
than your visions, and you crawl across their backs
like an insect: planting flags to prove you are Significant,
you are higher than the peak, you are enthroned atop stockpiled
conquests. And then one day you will age beyond your ambition,
more quickly than the hills, who have waited long to welcome
your stillness, O crippled conqueror. They will open their mouths
and swallow you up, and get on with being mountainous.
four
I am unique,
just like everyone else:
a carbon copy of originality,
and some days I want to scream this
to the trend watchers and number counters:
“I won’t add up!”
I am me, meaning
no one else, so shove your labels
where the sun don’t shine,
subtract my numbers from the census,
write me out of your economy.
Until
I get lonely,
and take a number.
Because it’s kind of nice
to know there are others
just like you.
burial
But then he left
and we filled the hole in
like a socket in the soil.
We pressed the dirt down
and scraped the top smooth;
in hope,
we planted no seed but one:
a single stone.
It all keeps sinking further
as we strive to raise it up.
Perhaps it’s true, the only thing
we agreed on:
he could not be replaced.
So we water the stone with hope
that someday it will wake
and take on flesh.
ex nihilo
I made something, and it made me back.
I will one day receive again
the stuff of me I pressed
into the pages, letters sent across
borders from someone in my past,
the one I will eventually hide from the world.
Yes, I plan to hide
in embarrassment at being seen
as I am now,
young and full of it, brash and passionate.
I will one day stuff this young me into cardboard crevices
and pilfer it from shelves, relieving the world
of the burden of knowing me
undone,
for what else, when you are young, can you be but undone?