I want to be

I want to

I want



I want to be close, close enough to feel the breath of it on my neck, but also far, far enough to see the dots becoming lines, and the lines becoming shapes, and the shapes becoming continents

I want to make, make things useful and useless, make unbound by material or overly specific circumstance, to make sound, and touch, and vision

I want to be ten artists at once, and ten artists at different times, and I want to try on, in succession, the different costumes of myself, and takes turns around the room in them, and maybe even do a little dance

I want to have secrets, a secret that I never tell, a secret that is only known by a stranger, a secret that is so secretive it retreats so far back, to be indistinguishable from something real and an invented memory

I want to be as still as a glass of water, still enough to feel the tilt of the earth turning, still enough to feel the thirst just before the moment of quenching, still enough to touch time and feel it's softness and it's ridges, and to feel it turning back on itself

I want to cry, and then cry some more, and wonder if it is because I am happy or sad, or for no reason at all, and wonder why it hurts and why it doesn't, and then take a tissue, and keep folding it until it is a very small square, and turn it over in my hand, and really feel it, and throw it in the trash, and follow it to the dump, and look at it there and wonder why we never use handkerchiefs

I want to get lost, like really lost, so lost that it feels as thought I will always be lost, and sit with that for a while, and remember that it is okay, and then draw some maps for all the places that I don't know that I am, and write some directions that head in four directions at once

I want to whisper at the volume of a megaphone and the volume of silence

I want to be seen, if only for a day, or an hour, or a moment, and to be heard and understood, and then to dissolve, slowly into the background, until I am indistinguishable from any other being, any other shape

I want to believe in art, to believe that it doesn't exist, to make art for the rest of my life and find out that it doesn't exist

I want to perfect turning pain into pleasure and anger into softness

I want to stand on solid ground and feel myself falling, and then fall in love, and fall in love again, and again, and never stop falling, and never fall out of love because there is no point in it, because nothing is truly ever lost, it is sitting in the next room, or sitting on a stump somewhere, or floating to the depth of the ocean

I want to do justice to this body, this body that so kindly houses my being, to the space that it takes up, and all that it takes up, to carve out places for being that are still there even when they are gone

I never want to stop wanting, because the day I stop is the day the world stops turning, I just want to want the right things, things not just for me, for you, for the things that keep me expanding and collapsing, always shifting but always kind of being the same

I don't ever want this poem to end, no it hasn't ended, not yet

no, not at all


still not yet