Aaron Shurin, WE ARE SOME PLACE

We are some place that isn’t now, with our bougainvillea shorts in a tangle, and the salt air fresh on our florid lips — but there are no flowers here, no viney pop-ups, no scarlet puff-balls blowing light. We are people who aren’t really us, changed by the falling curtains and blocks of ice, the spasms under sheeted clouds of shrieking rain, that pocked our arms with scars like bite marks… cinder stars… How did we change so fast, dropping our books and wigs in haste, dazed by the silver ripples in the sky that seemed to know our secret wants and needs…? We fell hard, wanting to be known, hurting to be had… as one by one we took the gelatin host, molded into our lungs so every breath we drew was stuck with the gum of who we couldn’t be, a thickened gasp of passing phantoms… Shaking our heads, arms hacking the air, we fled — but how do you flee the sky? — we stopped — or were we commanded to stop? — we settled — is that the term for falling down? — forever restless in our toes and lobes, heavy to sit and light to think. We are happening sometime that isn’t where we are, in a seam of a seal we can’t remember or describe… and pace the quadrant up and down, and claw the ether as if it were fitted stone, and glance over our shoulders in nervous twists as if we were coming to get ourselves, pale and driven and blazoned with revenge…