Prologue
Posted in Poetry & Prose, Love, Introspection on May 5th, 2008 No Comments »
Like waking up one day to discover the bed you built with your hands has not been a bed at all, but a weak wooden sculpture fashioned from splinters and shards. The house you constructed around you with lumber you took from your own backyard is not a house at all, but a balanced arrangement of cards, stacked end to end, poised to topple with a frail exhale. And the land that bears your name is not your land; it belongs to something larger and stronger, insistent and darker, and swallowing, and it has no name at all.
So all you have is the skin on your back, the marks and scars, the muscle memory, the lines beneath in bone where fissure and fracture healed over the marrow. And antibodies float in your blood and will till you’re dead, to testify to all the infections you fought and suppressed. And now you’re immune; if you fall to the same affliction again, you will not succumb. You will not succumb. You will not succumb.
Recognize. I recognize this place, I’ve visited before. I’m visited again. It looks like a beginning, but feels like an end.
