I was drafted before I even knew what it was. It was so long ago I don't remember it clearly.


Maybe it was before I was born.
Maybe I wasn't drafted at all. Maybe I volunteered.

If I could be any other creature, I would be one of them.


Not explicitly for the ability to escape gravity, but because I believe the air rushing along my body would cool the fire that burns me from the inside out.


I would be a smouldering fire dressed up in grey and white, disguised in feathers. I would outrun it all simply by picking up my legs and taking flight.

I am pulled into the orbit of the sun just as it accelerates away from me.


A parting gift as it falls over the ridge, gloves made of the setting sun to wear for the evening .

I look critically at the sky.


Storms coming in, I say.


When it gets here in the flesh, I will be long gone.

The birds appear suddenly at eye level as if by magic,
swept up on the currents of air from below.


I glimpse their underbellies as they zoom over me
ratcheting their landing gear inside,
slotting into place underneath their feathers.


Can the air wash you? Cleanse you like the water it rises from?
Erode away an interior lining as methodically as the surface of a cliff?

I am a creature
more or less.


I am not immune to the forces of nature.

You were not here when I came by; something in me collapsed.


Visualizing internally the injury as it happens.


Scoring the anatomy of a moment.

I am betrayed by the workings of a psyche processing untold numbers of associations and nuances per second.



The pressing desire to move forward unentangled by the masses of self-referential feedback loops and murky tissue.

When you come to find me, I will be here, lodged in a Vermeer painting.


If you come here, it will (I will) not be what you expect.