Here You Are

Why is it so important to be who you are

Hope people will see your skin, your smile, the places you have been

Try as you will, only the lowing of the herd while you stand like a tree that’s out of season, bare and bleak, with limbs as snakes spitting in the wind

Why so vital to carry mirrors against your chest, stand in the library stacks looking like books with underlined words that say, this is the way my hair falls when lying on my back

This is the way I hold my head in my hands

Read the pages please, here is my resume, here are my medical charts, here is what I was doing yesterday and twenty years before

You were dancing with the blind, falling through plate glass, drinking until your brain boiled in the emergency ward

Running away from something you didn’t have the courage to explore, didn’t have the heart to absorb, nor the fingers to trace outlines in the blood upon the floor

Tell your secrets, take flight with the wind and coast over the channel to some new land

Invent shiny nobs that turn on your life like candlelight in the dark

Live in the dust, but call it your castle keep and lay the rocks for the wars to come, when you shall die a thousand deaths, cut down by arrows, row after weeping row

Oh, what fun to tell people who you are and then watch them yawn and go to bed

All of us paupers on the shore

And therein lies the wonderous rub

Never to be born in the eyes of others despite saying,

Here I am