Today is a disassembled life, seven years have gone by
into boxes, the walls once so full of color are now bare and sepia –
this is seven years, stuffed into bags and crates.

I know I am not the only precariat of this country,
traversing a city like a nomad. Reclusiveness and the will
to breathe deep sends me down strange unorthodox roads;
I’m trying to catch truth, and she is marching.

The way is not closed off – not yet. Though I wonder
how long before the desert seizes another land. I planted
wildflowers and stones and paper poems all along the streets
of my neighborhood, and now I am leaving.
What might spring, some morning ten thousand years from now?
Will my hand crack the pavement, grip some passerby
by his ankle –

do I care? That most of living is as a ghost. That footprints
hardly ever change the world, my monogram shall peel away
in the savage winds of time.

I understand trees, their indomitable stillness. But
I am no tree. As a human being, I must lose control;

however I shall lose branches, shed needles, grow bark, one day
be old.