monuments

cathedrals breathe cold, swallow thoughts of might. pillars carved in ivory white—it is blank like bone and death. i feel unwelcome—trespasser, you of brown skin. why are you here? fineness rejects you in this faraway country.

i remember places in which i am not home and there are many. sea air is cold and smells sour and of salt. some shells are black and blue and i have a green plastic chest in which i keep mine. it has cracked. time erases many things and my tastebuds have lost sense. the sea does not remember me anymore. i swim like a fish as is right.

there is a place of endless sound and i was there before i was born. the air is thick with humanity and it is not beautiful—i know this because i am not welcome there. or, i am, but reaching erases my selves. a betrayal of the greatest kind.

i have been to places where heat sucks at water hungrily—i am proud to be sun-proof and turn dark as soot. hair sticks to my head and i am ostrich-like. the sea laps but it is unfamiliar. my blood calls it paradise and mosquitoes suck at my soul in merriment. i put up with many things and this is not one of them—

people cheer as i don a scarf. they believe i am becoming them! the idea is comical, terrifying, i will dissolve in not-ness—clay walls are bedecked in carpets and doorways are covered in cloth. different worlds are inside mine and this is one of them. they serenade me with songs i do not know from a country i have been to but once. monuments are treated with great irreverence and it is laudable. i bear a memory of glass tiles.

there is a place where there are many, many me’s—long braid and black eyes and brown skin and jeans. i am myself and it is odd in this place of great duplicity. voices ring in many words and half are unknown to me in my illiteracy. love blooms halfheartedly and fully. this is a place i would die for. it tastes of irony, these feet of mine wander—but roots must land and i am still not bound.

the world’s weight is heavy on the shoulders of the unmanned. shivers i dissolve in this.

ps

reposted from substack!