Post by Kate Burnham on Jan 20, 2018 5:41:12 GMT
Somewhere at the Other End of the Universe
Dear reader,
who are you, and
what do you mean?
What is your favorite
color and your deepest,
most abject fear? I ask
because I really want to know
another human being,
as deeply as I know myself,
before I die. I am afraid
I will never get to.
If home is
where the heart is,
my heart has taken
cues from Mel Gibson's
execution in Braveheart.
Chopped-up and pulled-apart
pieces of it have been stolen,
abandoned, hidden all over
the United States, and even
gotten lost in the afterlife, if
there is one, with the people
who were the only true loves
I've ever had. My family is
shrunken down to two members,
and I feel the smallness of
the world and our lives. Pieces
of my home are tucked away
into the cracks in the floorboards
and walls of craftsman houses,
buried in gardens, sunken into
sand dunes, folded under a hand
now buried in a casket in New
Concord, Kentucky, and written
on the feet of someone swimming
off the Florida coast to whom I
no longer speak but still have sweet
nightmares about.
Every time I move, nomadic, gypsy-like,
to follow a piece of my heart, I'm leaving
another piece, another home, behind, so that
I am always expatriate in my own country. I
reach a desired destination to be reminded
immediately that I miss wherever I have left,
and so I am restless, always anxious, ghostly
and haunting my own life and the
people in it with unfinished business, my home
scattered like bones, demolished to make way
for superhighways to nowhere. I make jokes
about this situation I am in. I imagine myself
a character in a Douglas Adams novel--not
very froody, always forgetting my goddamned
towel, empathizing with depressed robots,
yenning for a planet that is both expendable
and precious because it is too tiny for words.
Carl Sagan, help me out here with your
Pale Blue Dot wisdom. I think Arthur Dent
might be my spirit animal.
Dear reader,
would you pick me up
as a hitchhiker, and tell me
what you mean by being you?
I'm trying to get home--it's about
1000 miles away from here
in every direction, and I just want
to read your secret thoughts
while getting there.
Dear reader,
who are you, and
what do you mean?
What is your favorite
color and your deepest,
most abject fear? I ask
because I really want to know
another human being,
as deeply as I know myself,
before I die. I am afraid
I will never get to.
If home is
where the heart is,
my heart has taken
cues from Mel Gibson's
execution in Braveheart.
Chopped-up and pulled-apart
pieces of it have been stolen,
abandoned, hidden all over
the United States, and even
gotten lost in the afterlife, if
there is one, with the people
who were the only true loves
I've ever had. My family is
shrunken down to two members,
and I feel the smallness of
the world and our lives. Pieces
of my home are tucked away
into the cracks in the floorboards
and walls of craftsman houses,
buried in gardens, sunken into
sand dunes, folded under a hand
now buried in a casket in New
Concord, Kentucky, and written
on the feet of someone swimming
off the Florida coast to whom I
no longer speak but still have sweet
nightmares about.
Every time I move, nomadic, gypsy-like,
to follow a piece of my heart, I'm leaving
another piece, another home, behind, so that
I am always expatriate in my own country. I
reach a desired destination to be reminded
immediately that I miss wherever I have left,
and so I am restless, always anxious, ghostly
and haunting my own life and the
people in it with unfinished business, my home
scattered like bones, demolished to make way
for superhighways to nowhere. I make jokes
about this situation I am in. I imagine myself
a character in a Douglas Adams novel--not
very froody, always forgetting my goddamned
towel, empathizing with depressed robots,
yenning for a planet that is both expendable
and precious because it is too tiny for words.
Carl Sagan, help me out here with your
Pale Blue Dot wisdom. I think Arthur Dent
might be my spirit animal.
Dear reader,
would you pick me up
as a hitchhiker, and tell me
what you mean by being you?
I'm trying to get home--it's about
1000 miles away from here
in every direction, and I just want
to read your secret thoughts
while getting there.
