When it is all over for the day and you sit, waiting for the onslaught of dawn, which poets keep you awake? Do you whisper in couplets to Gibran and hear echoes of Lorde as the night washes away the ills of the day?
There’s a spot on the roof. If you stand there at the right moment it is as if you can hear the collective dreaming of a drowning city. In many ways one begins to understand why all the superheroes have their moments of soliloquy above a sleeping city.
Where do you go to be alone with your thoughts?
Is there a special seat where you go to gather the fragments of yourself from the atmosphere?
Do they come flying back from around the world? Or do you just connect with all the versions of yourself that you have left nursing those who needed them the most?
*
Somewhere in the city there is an arboretum. In the arboretum stands a tree with golden flowers. Surrounded by a sea of dull this tree continues to flower, unashamed of putting the trees around it to shame.
*
I still find these letters increasingly difficult to write. I see the poets coming to read them like I once read poetry myself. Looking for traces of a self I wanted to possess but never seemed to summon in person. Did you ever read poetry like that? In whose lines have you found yourself? Which poets left fragments of themselves behind to fill the holes left by the pieces you no longer had?
*
Where do you go to be alone with your thoughts?
*
The art of healing is only useful for the broken. How many times have you watched as they continued to tell stories? How many times have you heard revised histories erase the very truths that define the present?
If I plucked a flower from the tree at the arboretum and ran halfway across town with it, would it die? What about if I made sure to store it safely in my clenched fist, holding it tight to ensure it doesn’t get lost? What about if, as I ran, I became more paranoid about losing the flower, so I held it tighter?
Have you ever performed CPR on a gold flower? It’s a very delicate procedure that involves gently holding the calyx between your forefingers and using your thumbs to separate the style from the stigma.
But stigma, once attached, is almost impossible to get rid of, isn’t it?
*
A poet sits under a tree reading a book, trying to find themselves in redacted histories.
A flower falls on their head.
Do they run? Or do they open their eyes, as another fragment holds space for pieces that are out holding space for someone else?
Signed,
A Dependent Observer