sincere: whole, clean, pure, uninjured, unmixed

a few years ago, i learned honesty
was not a noun to be adjectivised,
but a state to be verbed,
and more than that, to be lived
as a continuous stretch

(what else is upgrowing)

so in an intuitive impulsive address to life,
i stated
that i would hereby want to be bad at lying
in order to surrender all my secrets,
(unwanted toys i know were teaching me bad habits)

one by one
they left my coffers,
sometimes by my handing them over to embracing hands,
othertimes by clutching fingers pulling at snapping threads,
yet moretimes by no transaction of my own,
but by my standing outside castle walls, rained upon,
watching the stones wet
as my clothes soak and my clutchings slide out
from underneath my clever fabrics,
damp and discontraptioned.

despite the weather, i'd repeated to myself that
it was worth losing my patchwork playthings
since they would never satisfy
(despite their promises otherwise)

a few years later,
i have a parent who makes sure my head
is facing the sea,
even in front of the yawning waves,
even when i thrash about
tattooing emotions on my cheeks and corneas,
looking for surfaces to glance at me,
so that i can catch me looking back

the glimpse is of a pair of pupils
dilating, taking in the wordless
brushes of open eyes.

uncomputing

a swirling bend in the atmosphere

this opening
allows me to feel stitchless and gaping,
the outbreaths of a hundred people filling
it
and the strange sound
of their swimming irises
doing laps over me
every day

i have gotten to wear a clock face
instead of my own.
my hands are tied to one another
telling the timelessness of it all,
all a little wander

every day
the outbreaths of a hundred people
bubble into the space of me

they refract
they squeeze
and they burst,
they leave me standing in their oxygen,
a swirling bend in the atmosphere

poem, touching

the skin off your emotions
slides
like slips of ink into blots

there are pages of condensation
troubled by the pressed prints
of your fingers
in the book of us

we wrote a poem,
touching
at the corners
we wrote letters
to the dust to gather
we wrote that a thought be
shut into the binding
so that when it opens,
the covers would hold

watching for my earth

what is there in me
in the hallucination pushing at the ground
in the teeth barring in words
that resonates,
that stirs
at the string in the someones around me

ties them in naughts,
fiddles with a few cells here and there
triggers reactions

they are all watching for my earth
to spin,
to catch at orbiting debris,
to circle about what they really want to be closer to

a hole in the fabric of their sorts