Sonnets to Orpheus

blue sea, red sea

light-headed with drunken laughter isn't the same thing as happiness, and if you hold your breath for long enough the same feeling ensues. a headache of mirth. a branding of dimples.

I  h a v e  n o t  f o u n d  h a p p i n e s s ;  t h e  p a i n s  o f  j o y  w i l l  d o. 

how much of your life has taken shape of something that is always leaving? I sit on the ground of the Atlanta airport, windows for walls flashing with lightning, and count the times I have thrust myself into the air; in the direction of away - from the things I want to be near most. I spent my childhood in airports, chewing on chocolate cigarettes and black licorice. these days, I fall asleep to the roaring of planes taking off and descending, see the wings of birds and think of homeland.

My being is dichotomy.

here is a woman who flies; she is kissing me, "what do you want to happen with your body?" I lose count of the times I pressed my face to the window to see the sprawling white mountains of Greenland, wondered what it would be like to fall from the sky and into their marshmallow caress. "burn me and pour what's left over the Atlantic. I don't belong here or there." years, dreaming of becoming a bird, of sprouting wings so I didn't have to live in between. a young girl with wounded eyes and hair whipped by the wind, collecting miniature airplanes; in them, she saw herself soaring, a mechanical bird full of yearning.

I have immortal longings in me.

I watch the sunrise outside the airport in Amsterdam as I wait for the train, and think that even now, there remains something intrinsically unfinished about me. there is this organic resting state of being, and this inevitable weariness that follows. how can I not study all that lies before me, emulate anything that stimulates growth? all of us, chameleons and plagiarists, desperately hoping to find meaning in the spaces that surround us. what is this creed of obsession, this ravenous thing inside of me that refuses to rest?

Orpheus, I'm hungry.

perhaps we are all perpetually tracing back to the origin, to the way things were before they were. do you feel the expanse in everything you do not know? all I have is a box of fossils, an examination of life; imprints of leaves, the spine of a stag, a shark tooth, an ammonite stepped on in a creek in Kentucky. I shake a pan and sift for gold with every ounce of my tiny body and think of what it would be to extract myself, like a mineral, from the rest of the world. I crawl through the crevices of a ghost town, leave my fingertips on the broken windows of every fallen home, look out into the valley until it morphs into what it was so long ago, before time had her way with things.