Cornerstone

Cornerstone

Thirty-Eight, down by the river that hummed. I sang myself sadly gorgeous. The miraculous sounds that emanate from a sweet voice when the machete is being swung at the throat. My tongue is galaxy. You live there. I learned you like the other songs that inhabit me. Dragged up like sunken cars in the lake of my lungs.
I was scattered like seedlings, dawn music, nationless birds. My soul taking shape as this wild vine. The smell of after last night’s rain, I became, the musk of leaves and moisture in the woods. One moment, a sun reveals a brilliant cerulean sky. Next, clouds scudding across the sky. I have seen how far I can run away from myself and I know who I want to be when I come back. Always asking, ‘What were we then if we were not what we were to become?” This is not the question asked of how it begins, but it is how I come to understand it. One step turns into miles and miles turn into years. Years find myself to be so far away from w here I started still pretty much the same. At some point, you become less buildings and more cornerstones. Fire doesn’t ravage you like a plain. Still, every so often someone reminds you that’s flesh and skin you’re wearing. They call you to notice how sexy this is. It detonates a lot of sorrows of landmine beginnings. I crouch beneath their body. Sometimes it’s hard not to want to stay and sometimes it’s hard not to let go. It’s been a long of long car rides to the coast to sit in silence and remember how to not stop breathing. Mad lib identities for days. I cross borders I do not speak about. Rosary in pocket for safekeeping. Eyes opened beyond wide open, a force unknown breaks inside me and pickpockets all the locked parts of me. What if I told you, all that happened is I was hummed a lullaby by a hawk that stole all the sleeping bunnies nesting inside me. Was the act more intimate than all the acts of making love solely for the endorphins? I lay in shade diaphanous. Crowded apparitions gather around. All it takes is one kiss and you start to count on something being there, but it’s unmentioned that one kiss can also um-map all the secret places you’ve been hiding, places you were planning on going, when I find out I’m nothing like I said I’d be.