i walk my walk and think about you




i think about the poem i wrote about a pole both connecting me to the ocean + keeping us apart
is this what it means to literally ‘think alongside’
(can you literally think alongside)

am i always speaking nearby to you ?
does speaking nearby equate in distance ?
do these words (which are not my words) lower themselves into the river and into the ocean
through freezing ‘modern waters’ until finally disembarking at your doorstep ?

my hair is wet with Trinh T Minh Ha, Astrida Neimanis, Brian Thill
after i scrub away the synthetic debris (with who?)
they are what remain

reminding me that each heartache is nearby and alongside and if names are emotional architectures we are all bound up together in shipyards

about you walking
about a different kind of you

1.

even after all this we carve the landscape into a message of "beware" 

we take our factories into the tide and begin to build
our business is invisible and lucrative
we sit for hours threading tiny polymers on silken threads for necklaces

we tell the water it is our counterpart
we tell it that we are the same
that we are made up of the same stuff

we see ourselves in them and call them 'bodies'
we do not subscribe to active listening
we don't have time

and so we all lay down
parallel to each other
body to body
clay to fresh water

2.

(body)

(body)