freezing rain nightwrite

Take out your pens and write for two minutes as if you've never written before, the paper staring at the backs of your eyes, your sore, cracked ribs, your joints tired from holding things together and bringing things together. I think I remember how to let go of my body, but not when I'm trying to hard to change my body, tilt the lights so they don't get caught so harshly on my hard edges. My fingers are attracted to each other, run their knuckles across unsuspecting skin when my mind is elsewhere, in poetry perhaps, but the kind that is always so different, the kind with a grade. We paint each doll a third eye on its forehead, paint a sunflower where each ear used to be, watch it bloom into something we didn't expect, not better or worse than what would have appeared, reassembled itself in the mist, if we knew what we were doing, if we knew why we were doing it, if we knew to count our steps backward, if we knew what was freezing to the roads, only in our ideas, full of accidental mischief parading in a room built especially for parades, with windows in the stands that you can, assuming you bought a ticket, open as a portal where hope turns to confetti and doubt turns to streamers, more substantial but less of what we want. The environmentalists, the people I mean, shake their heads and begin to worry, but just as shadows fall across their eyes, the sun comes up expectedly and the confetti sprouts, takes root quite unexpectedly, and we see they were seeds all along. We need more fields of sunflowers or vines or trees or moss but we never stay long enough to find out which, just to see tiny white fibers reaching toward the light like the spindles of our hands reaching. Take out your pens.