Orbiting

I would have preferred a monk

and maybe a lifetime of discipline

over the pace I chose to find some way,

collecting my hospital bracelets

from the bin as if they were

peace treaties to some god.

They say the ego is the last to go;

even the broken ones

seem to think they have something worth

holding onto.

But once mine did I spent a year in a cave,

afraid and starved, trying to fight for that

last little part of me that liked to slip away

and send me off into the air.

The revolutions of seasons finally ended

and I found myself in some kind of light–

someone must’ve mentioned something

about grace, something about balance: no mind.

I wanted No Mind, that traitor.

And because there was nothing left for me to do

I let go

and it became clear to me that gravity

could be seducing in its standards

and that maybe to fall away

from all that I knew

was really a falling forward–orbiting

past the dropped walls of the eartrh–

looking back to see myself–everyone–as mere

carnations

nothing wild but with complexities harnassed–

tamed; we had grown in our own beds in files

and as I drifted further into the void

I lost fear; I wasn’t afraid

to not be such a soft, pink thing

but an exasperation of molecules, a release

from the machinery of my chemistry

that I had made over this

peculiar life; and maybe

once I pass

the fear of losing who I am

or what I was

I can ground myself in a  plasma

of the stillness invading my mind

and I’ll finally go home

limitless, adrift, passionless,

pain as vague as air.