Unfinished Pieces Searching for Home
Sometimes I let go of finishing a piece, making it make sense, or fitting it into a wider narrative.
Inspired by Ben Okri
Out of the country of my forehead, a city trained its eye on me. It rung rapidly, rapping soundly like artillery on my occipital bone, and I awoke to my calling. I was reluctant, too, to depart, from the safety of my solitude. I had made a home of it, and solitude’s comforts, its companionship of ignorance, held me in its arsenal of softness, like burnt bundt cake to the floral corners of a caked metal shell. The edges of ignorance are sharp. Blackened in flower-powered charcoal, tasting faintly of coal and cinnamon.
I could try to go swiftly but… What if… WHAT IF THE SUN FELL AND THE MOON ROSE AGAIN ON MARS AND THE ROSES FELL AND THEIR PATTERNS WERE PLUCKED OUT BY THORN. NEVER TO SEE THE SUN, THEY WOULD PERISH.
From ritual
Sara leaned into the wind. Her hair sometimes struck her across the face but mostly it trailed riotously out the passenger seat window. And Sara dreamed. Leaning further, head in flight, she gazed at her dreams blooming vibrantly all along the red earth running either side of the vehicle. They grew.
She tended them secretly. Tucked in her shoelaces, between teeth, as her dream flowed towards her with the distance breaking colors particular to wildflowers.
Wildflower color was different. They were grand and non-exotic colors. They didn’t bleed, unlike raspberry-rose red and narcotic blue. They could be dreamt, kept unmanaged by degrees.
Plucking up from her petaled arms stacked underneath, Sara finally stopped gazing and started watching. Watching her dream stretch to the horizon as the couple rode the long road. The colors wove seas for her, and suddenly, she could travel their pattern towards meaning: the long-way road led nowhere like home.
When you can’t courage yourself further
I bear you on my back
The green-black-yellow-red-blue-and-
White flags I tore down to shape a pedestal of me
You do not weigh me down
You—not house maid-secretary-chef-grocer-nor-
Porter-prisoner-laborer-sharecropper-gambler-addict
We your sons-daughters-and-
All-between carry this joy—Is not stone burden
I’m sorry I quit recalling
My willingness for remembrance