I Exist Two Inches Outside My Skin.

Meet me again

Without hearing my name, my voice, before I speak,

Without knowing my face and the shapes it makes

When I'm happy, or upset, or afraid,

Without the histories you carry into its encounter.

Meet me in that familiar way

We tend to find so easily with strangers,

When the words and the images are only for show

And only new energy is in play,

Deciding for us whether we want to keep looking,

Before we ever have their stories and patterns

To satisfy the needs of our conscious minds.

I am only archeology,

Patterns of houses and temples and toilets

Vaguely familiar to you,

As distant and malleable as monochrome dust,

As intimate and terrifying as every mirror you've ever looked in.

But it's only bones---are they white when they're still inside?

Or covered in stains and blood and fluids you can't quite pronounce?---

I've watched the skins change many times;

It's uncomfortable and confusing,

Feathers everywhere,

Blood I thought was someone else's,

Newborn for the thousandth time.

I know it's confusing.

It's hardly comprehensible to me,

Pronouns like stray clouds chased out by a storm,

Emotions and motions arising and falling

With the consistency of Midwest snowfall,

Yet I---I mean the real "I"; not me, not this shape, not this memory---do not change.

You've met this body, this tongue, these eyes,

And at times you may have glimpsed me beneath all my clothes

When I've taken them off 'til there's only muscle and bone exposed,

And then the gore is a trauma,

And the deeper you get, the farther you stray

Because you've gone right through what you wanted to find

Arrived at the scary faces on the borders

Of those parts most densely shadowed from who I am.

Meet me again,

Where my body is just a moment

And the plants and dirt and fluids and cells

That went into making me are so much matter,

Floating endlessly in either direction.

Only this time, remember

That my ghost is out here,

Dancing in the space between us,

Haunting my own vessel

Like wildfire smoke creeping slowly up the valley,

Like October fog caressing the lines of the mountains,

Like the space between the rain jumping from place to place,

Like the blankets of snow that conspire to shape all this physical realm

Under their impossible perfection, falling like feathers from the sky.