We are,
Temporarily,
Consumed by what we touch...
Assimilated...
And we become
The essence
Of such things
For a time...
Welts left behind...
Iconographic characters...
Hieroglyphic scar tissue...
This is how memory
Burns itself
Into the skin...
The people we physically touch...
Those that touch our skin
Leave swampy impressions
In the peat bog...
Footprints
Slowly filling
With tea colored water...
Sedimentation
Eventually
Levels things out,
But the absence lingers
Just as their ghost
Still touches you
Like a phantom limb
Cramping or itching...
Spasms of recollection...
It changes you...
You assimilate
The torn bits of paper
And the ashes
Of burned manuscripts...
Flaming Constantinople libraries
Turning common knowledge
Into the arcane...
Making what it is
To be human
Something profane...
The politics of social intercourse
And the touch of a hand...
Thumb tracing her lips
Gently....
Blisters raising
From the shock of the heat
That emotions can produce...
Tracing the scars
With a willow branch
Dowsing for meaning...
What is intentional,
And what was carelessness?
They say everything happens for a reason...
But this isn't fate,
It's simply experience...
We try to find meaning in the words
Tumbling from
The mouth of the river,
Settling, instead,
To invent something that fits
Our expectation...
There is no meaning
Other than simply being there,
Feeling that touch,
Even after the tide has taken it's tithe
Of the shoreline...
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