All You Know Now

zoetribley

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There’s a unique weight in this world that pulls you down and out of your home in the woods. It holds you still, solving riddles and mental math. It needs you to fold so they can step on your back to get something from the kitchen cabinet, leaving you all sorts of uneven. Cooking with a crooked spine.

 

This weight makes you forget the words you love, like kismet. Like eloquence, frondescence, equipoise, and rhythm. You don’t know language outside quiet, defense, hollow, and tense; you chew on their meaning in the sanctuary of a corner, too hidden to be found guilty.

 

This weight takes bucolic curls of cursive and turns them into scissors. It starves you until you’re as skinny sharp. Hollowed heart. An emaciated body perfect for burrowing. It lays steel blankets over lichen skin and shines lamplight in your eyes.

 

This weight lets you rot behind bars that breakup the cloud’s poetry. It keeps you beneath cirrus paths migrating north to those still in velvet trees, ribs whole and lungs river clean.

And you stay.

Learning unsure and unkind.

As the weight kicks you down and closes the blinds.

 

 

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