Poems

Human beings, by nature, are lonely. Perhaps this served a biological purpose many years ago when survival of our race was something uncertain.

These days it feels like a fluke. Some quirk in the evolutionary system that was never ironed out.

You see we live inside ourselves, and while our bodies continue to move and desire life we are trapped within. With no way out. A jumbled mess of memories and emotions held in a breathing, seeing, hearing, capsule.

It feels strange referring to human beings as a whole.

A fox is just like every other fox. It wants to survive so it hunts, it wants to survive so it rests, it wants to survive so it finds a mate. Every fox wants these things.

A human is not like every other human. They want love, they want success, they want stupid silly things like parties and art. They cant even agree on why they live in the first place.

Its incredibly lonely.

So I search for the me in others. Scour for the pieces of myself outside myself. No matter how small, no matter how inconsequential.

I reach out my hands to grasp on to any familiarity I reach till it hurts and I keep reaching keep looking keep searching keep finding and holding and not letting go.

One of my close friends has my eyes, one has my laugh, anothers hands match mine perfectly.

I love the parts of me in them, and I love the parts that are not me

I hope they love the parts of themselves in me as well.

I am a room with four walls.

One ceiling.

One floor.

One rug.

One window.

One door with one handle.

One bed with one blanket, and four pillows.

One chair beside one desk.

One bookshelf with an ever changing number of books.

One mirror.

One dresser with four drawers.

Two Lamps on two side tables.

Two cork boards.

Two ceramic pots containing two plants. One clover, one cactus.

Two cats, occasionally, but never at the same time.

And foxes. Lots of foxes.

Hand Carved out of wood and painted with care.

Printed on paper with ink. Number twelve of twenty five.

Watercolour, palm-sized.

Acrylic pin, displayed proudly.

one,

Two stuffed toys.

And many more.

Invisible foxes nesting under piles of clothes.

Immaterial foxes hiding between filled sketchbooks.

nconspicuous foxes digging holes in a mattress.

Imperceivable foxes barking at birds from behind a closed window.

I am a home for foxes.

Sad foxes, happy foxes, angry foxes.

Foxes that bite and foxes that jump and run and howl and yelp.

Foxes so small they can only be occasionally glimpsed under a powerful microscope, if you are very lucky and patient.

Foxes so large they can touch their noses to the stars, and tickle the galaxy with a swish of their cosmic tails.

One hundred.

Two hundred.

Three hundred foxes.

Four hundred.

Five hundred.

Six hundred more.

Foxes in every wall, floor board, crack, corner, edge, line.

I am a room filled with foxes and nothing but foxes.

Foxes forever and always.

We thought we knew what the afterlife was like.

It was nothing like this.

I cant move

I cant speak

I cant breathe

I have no body

I am nothing

Yet I think. I can do nothing but think.

And observe.

The space I exist in does not change. The temperature is neither hot nor cold. The air neither fresh nor stale.

The sun here is much brighter than the one I remember, but it gives off no warmth. It doesnt set either. It simply dissipates each night, and returns just as swiftly each morning.

There is no weather either. No rain. No snow. No wind.

It is static. Constant.

But I am not alone here. Far from it. I have never seen so many people in my life. And yet in death I cannot escape from them.

They swarm in with the sun by the thousands and leave right before it goes every evening.

They are most certainly human. I can see that as clear as day. But they are unfamiliar, and unlike this realm, they are ever changing. I dont think Ive ever seen the same face twice.

And they speak in languages unlike anything Ive ever heard.

They crowd around me like vultures circling bones.

They stare at me, but they dont recognize me. Dont see me as one of their own.

They talk to eachother in their strange languages. They never talk to me.

I try to find my meaning in my fate.

Is this hell? An endless lonely punishment, surrounded by people I will never reach?

Or is it heaven? Perfectly preserved with all my memories in a place untouched by nature's wrath?

Or is this not my afterlife at all?

Maybe its theirs. Maybe I'm meant for them.

Many pass me by with nothing more than a glance. Some linger for a little while, studying me carefully. Every so

often one will look upon me in awe, eyes filled with emotion.

I see something change within them. Something click.

Something about me fascinates them.

But I no longer have a body. I am no longer anything.

So what are they seeing?