1145andishouldbesleeping nightwrite

I stare at the past and feel it with me now, like soft ghosts caressing my cheeks, sobbing into my shirt, laughing. I know what it's like to wait on the porch steps at eleven minutes until tomorrow, watching the light dancing through broken bottles in the gutter, teaching my dreams to fly so they don't have to be right here at this moment, with so many lines to fill, so many lines of people I will never know. I have to create their lives so they don't stain my skin with longing, like ink at the corners of my mouth, showing the world how I gnaw at my pens when I've worn my fingers to the bone, set my notebooks on fire because I love them so much and it's so cold in January, portraits of pieces of a family on my wall, the nails digging in, plaster dust gathering around my toes. When I step back, my footprints seem so big. They crush the mountains so I have nothing left to breathe but the moaning trains I've never seen but always heard, spirits that are part of the darkness because I notice nothing in the day but approaching evening, halos of cigarette smoke sneaking through my vents, smothering the last embers in my chest then settling in my lungs. Statues in the park watch their hands crumble, ants tearing apart a cracker with millions of tiny jaws, starving, making me wonder
if ants had ribs and babies had six arms there would be no real difference.
My soul tells me to take the Earth in my arms and tell it that it's powerful, teach it that it's beautiful, until all its scars have filled with water, become lakes and tributaries, places where birds pluck fish like gems from the tides, where the bottom is just cloudy enough that I can't tell what color my knees are but I still know they're there if I stay under forever, breathing the seaweed and sorting my thoughts.