ERECTING SAND CASTLES IN THE SKY OF ANOTHER BYGONE HOUR, MINUTE, BREATH

APRIL 20, 2013

it’s the sound of
my own voice saying it:
we don’t live lives, we live
a hundred lives, a thousand, a million...
and i know that i’m right: looking back,
i hardly know me at all.

so chasing the hiss of vapor phantoms, memories scroll
across a span of time so wide that if you fell
you’d never stop
and nothing that i once was seems quite true.
and nothing that i once touched remains.

dust doesn’t settle, you see; it blows.
and the objects it would cling to,
they dissolve
just as quickly as appear.

the grasping hand holds nothing,
not even the truth of its own skin.

eventually, it will be time
to get up from this place and move to another, leaving
this actual thing to intangible kingdoms
cast to heaven, made of air.