2004-04-12 - 12:59 a.m.
come away with me
and forget
is like saying, "fly"
so don't worry about forgetting
just come
away with me
we can't climb a mountaintop
we might just have to settle for a stone bridge
a place in the arms of high grass on someone's lawn
because the grass isn't ours..it's someone's...
there is the absence of freedom in physical places, inside the walls of bodies
and yet we long to come away
despite having numbered each freeway, and measured the length of roads, houses, doorways, and the height of growing children
the legs-- running freely in the sand with pails and shovels and light burdens --are imprisoned in their parents gaze, inside invisible boundaries called schools and sidewalks and neighborhoods and parks and the approach of bedtimes and the obligation of chores
and every rule measures some piece of us that wants to grow
nature's braces wired, stretching across the crooked teeth of our natural inclination
making us pretty.. and whole.. with bitter wine-pressed tears in the backyard... while our white dress walks in front.. kind, thoughtful words for our hearers.. and affection for those who have none..
because our two legs are bonded .. and while their wander-prone hearts die inside tall cement, steel, and lines cut once, twice, and several times with the roll call of prisoners numbered one after the other, we... we are forced to live with the thoughtful ache of freedom on our lips.. and skyward joy haunting our eyes, communal, we look forward to the steps ahead of us, that fell behind someone on their way over to aide.. as we fell into each other ..
we turned around in circles... faster than we walked in them..
we orbited our lives before we even lived them out.. until freedom was a distant planet that always followed our eyes like the Mona Lisa, smiling.. in her prison on the wall..
and she no more looked in, than we looked out at her from our own eyes following a dry treasure bed, perennial, the itch of being human and unable to change the verdict.
