I find my reality existing at the end of golden paved streets where the grass has overgrown like coiling barbed wires; the road signs off center and crooked in place of where the sidewalk ends. Not knowing is a blind soar into recently drained ravines and my ability to trust an inability to fly is neither metaphorical nor real. So I run. I run for an idea that sounds simpler than pursuing my confusions, as if there’s nothing I’ve wanted more than to sink into pristine universes that orbit around mini vans for soccer moms.

There’s more optimism in sinking, I suppose.

Drowning without voice in a town without a face surrounded by people who don’t hear is the closest I’ve ever come to becoming a shadow, and if I merely use this as reason to stay, I do hope you’ll forgive me. There’s a safety in my weaknesses, and the chambers of mundane that contort themselves into picket fences that fence around the creativity I claim they’ve stifled, and that is the height on the swing that I dare not to pass.

Allusions have swallowed me whole and I lie in figurative waters gripping at the theoretical straws passed out at 5^th grade birthday parties to give me the outer body revelations that my optimistic fear cannot expose. Let the light shine down on my ignorance when the bittersweet taste of gold streets and metallic poisoning changes my genetic makeup into the one thing I promised I’d never become. Whatever it is exactly, would be best to say. I never knew the right words when the motions were rammed down my throat, I just kissed the blue skies filled with pesticides on someone else’s accord on the hopes I’d be remembered as sweet. Truth be told I can’t tell you if the blues were ocean waves lapping my lips –everything anchors one way or another, and I was the first to dive inside and swim to the other side.

It’s blazingly bright over here and the glare illuminates my reflection as I sprint past the rearview mirrors of a minivan orbit all the way back home to a picket fence that chopped the overgrown, coiling grass a month before the rent was due. My arms are out to my sides but I’m still on the ground. I’m still on the ground.

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