I breathe human through my fingers

I breathe human through my fingers. Am otherwise thin eyed and patient,

reading existence as a brush of listless wind.

The tongue of creation may translate my hungers and a dull vicious calm.

Many hours I cannot sense what draws me and persist then in echoes.

I walk into the tide searching death and tangle my organs in

deep morning cold excavations cutting under my animal agenda and heart.

My lungs are strong and mind ties a needle taut north on goal

until the heart attack afternoon or a drowning.

 

Inside I am mostly heavy static, but create and feel I should,

should anything because the clear world whirls madness.

The god of goodness innate has been shredded,

never stood whole but there are traces she touched and I may be some.

Become shaking moments and desperation. I wish for anything in the world.

Since living in Seattle these nine months I have learned

that I do not love nature as once thought I could.

Despite a brief wash of euphoric solidarity,

it is not possible for me to love the world and all its passengers.

I shall never relinquish that hope for love,

even unfeeling in the midst of beauty and truth.

I'll acknowledge and perhaps reach there slowly.

 

I have confused myself with doubts on the emptiness of total meaning.

Whether my path is ineffectual compared against

what justice I might sew if my strengths were applied elsewhere.

I convince myself with fear and escapefulness of

there is no pure good. No option only to heal or live as a clean breath in smoke.

Any pursuit is equal shoutings against a clamped palm

until the ocean floats over your stunned and naked body.

And I feel nothing. Mumbling with my slit-up shins in the brine and

stars clatter overhead like spoons in a shutting drawer. Our Earth is

the shadow of an insect lost on paper white fields, so minuscule and

wandering pangs of connection or knotted in violence hunger

 

 

Rats Trujillo

Rats Alice Trujillo is a grocery store worker, queer social dissident, and esoteric multimedia artist. They are active around Seattle and their writings appear sporadically in print and digital. Between writing and other work they arrange and perform leftfield electronic music as 'Uncanny Dandelions'. Rats recommends mutual aid over charity, but a group in need of funds is From The Heart PNW. They accept support through their venmo account @fromtheheartpnw.

 

Edited for Unlikely by Jonathan Penton, Editor-in-Chief
Last revised on Thursday, August 26, 2021 - 13:37