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There is a price, you being different
when money is meaningless and
all that matters is another creature
seeing what they see, knowing
which fantasies inhabit each one –
what experience has laid down
sending each to their far corners
to dwell in a haven of unique and
delicate madness, where the unsaid
matters most urgently, and all words
that are easily said, are never required,
since such common things, need naught.
How unlikely finding the misunderstood
further out, as if all the impossible faces
flying apart as random seeds, discover
past all chaos, oxbow lakes formed
through an alien grace not yet descended
on those who, already knowing their way,
through an act of hearing all that is not
given, yet left to be opened, only by you.
This is how I remember, not by nameable
facets of stone, but through the air
we breathe, displaced by growing things
in their marvelous slopes beyond shape,
where the mind fails to hold any substance
to be called its own, blown through
endless rounds of small bullets, flashes
of current, the wind that knocks down
anything trying to stand on false feet –
and arms, understanding their strength,
that hold without tiring in the aftermath.
To observe the plotting of a maze as
creatures rummage to find the switch
never hearing above the din of walls,
this is the difference; the price is exile
along the broken stretch of travelers
unaccustomed to their own perception
within a fabric of dream, held together
simply by a chance they might be seen,
and more, looked to, to be revealed.
