senses

i think about insomnia, the way senses shift, more blurry but more defined,

and always, i think of water.

the static in my ears is clearer;

if i still could read music, maybe i could pick out the the key, the resonance.

instead, it's like a locust: unobtrusive, but always there.

i hear music and i choose not to think about it:

i set it to the cadence of the waves.

my eyesight is a nebulous thing. i take off my glasses,

set them on my chest,

and look, briefly, at a different world, like the geometry is wrong;

i look for straight lines, definable angles,

answers to why my postcards won't stay on my walls.

(sometimes, i step outside, and i inhale, closing my eyes,

and there are hints of water, of growing things;

i see glimpes of the bay; even the ocean, occcasionally.

it hangs heavy on my tongue,

my face is expressionless.)

and i am blurry, maybe,

a slurry, suspended in water,

waiting for transportation.

i lose my senses,

my verses grow smaller,

duller, less defined.

i know that the honeysuckle exists,

the waves licking over my bent knees,

splashing into my mouth and stinging my eyes.

i know that i am a girl of a different coast,

reading music in the math of the knee-high tides as i choke on saltwater,

stinging in my nostrils as i cough, cross-legged in the greyish-green.

my eyes, occasionally, resemble the atlantic,

blue and green and grey, and restless, angry, dissatisfied;

i splash at my own shores, scraping my toes on the sand.

i stare, and i think of other continents, other hemispheres,

other bodies of water i stepped into briefly,

and shivered, and smiled.

and i am a silhouette of static:

the ebb and flow of the waves, the whine of locusts,

the inhalation of sickly sweet flowers,

they coalesce, wrapping around me, choking.

and the way my myopia turns the sand and the sky into a coloring book,

detailed as crayons in kindergarten hands.