Three Year Poem

First drafted February 24th, 2017 at 5:34pm

tasting water is infancy.
drinking and drinking and drinking

rolling over onto all fours,
baptism leaves a sting of water up your nose,
a voice that makes others laugh,
eyes welling but bright

when it’s time to rise,
you balance, toes gripping wet rock.
yet no one understands when you slip
and fall and stand and fall

water rises insidiously, 
head goes under and you realize
sound travels for miles and miles and miles.
your own thoughts indistinguishable from 
four oceans full of voices

(clearing your head can be like trying to empty
a pool with a broom. or like trying to dam
a river with a broom. regardless,
you aren’t equipped with the right tools
to fathom exponentially expanding libraries)

trying to take a break
still means treading water

until vision goes, blurry shapes float.
long before any creature breathed dry air,
your eyeballs evolved for water.
pre-ancestral, beyond memory

dissolving
consciousness adrift

First drafted February 24th, 2017 at 5:34pm

tasting water is infancy.
drinking and drinking and drinking

rolling over onto all fours,
baptism leaves a sting of water up your nose,
a voice that makes others laugh,
eyes welling but bright

when it’s time to rise,
you balance, toes gripping wet rock.
yet no one understands when you slip
and fall and stand and fall

water rises insidiously, 
head goes under and you realize
sound travels for miles and miles and miles.
your own thoughts indistinguishable from 
four oceans full of voices

(clearing your head can be like trying to empty
a pool with a broom. or like trying to dam
a river with a broom. regardless,
you aren’t equipped with the right tools
to fathom exponentially expanding libraries)

trying to take a break
still means treading water

until vision goes, blurry shapes float.
long before any creature breathed dry air,
your eyeballs evolved for water.
pre-ancestral, beyond memory

dissolving
consciousness adrift

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