glass world

i. once all the rare fruit had gone rotten on the trees & fallen to the ground

normalcy was the seed in my back pocket offering the only way to stave off the hunger, if only in some distant future

ii. as i dug through the dirt to place the seed, i looked around at those people who planted theirs long ago

and never bothered with the rare fruit which was too high to reach anyway

and i cursed the clouds and asked, why didn't i just plant mine a long time ago?

iii. now i've arrived in the distant future and obtained, if nothing else,

again and again i ask the same question: how do they know what to say?

my mind is like ice holding frozen words

and these words, once alive, died the moment they froze all those years ago:

the moment i muted myself out of pure fear

like some prey animal

and now if i somehow managed to unfreeze them everyone would know everyone would know

from my archaic language that i am not like them, that i was too weak to keep speaking

and thus became some weird relic of the past, some alien who doesn't understand

distractable dizzy distant daydreamer:

preoccupation is my occupation & i melt at the demands of the world

where once there was sky i now see the flat, silver surface of a sledgehammer trying to shape me trying to make me