(All My Life)

Trying to Fill

A Person Shaped

Hole in the World

One Evening Child

My whole being drawn

Inward toward

A Sheltering Skin

Curled inside a pillowcase

Naked

Under Control

Sticks and Twigs Boy with

Shock of white curls Cut

by the Barber to

My Father’s Ivy League Style

and pasted down

Perfectly

flat and straight.

Myself Prison

All those vague insecurities about belonging

congealed in a mind too early aware

of void and infinity

Of Space-Time-Matter-Energy

Constructed Walls to enclose

My perceived separate existence

Piece by piece the haphazard overlapping barriers

dismantled by the busy fingers of every experience

of connection and worn away by

the incessant

tidal forces of sensation and empathy

faster than I can build them

leaving me exposed and breathing

Incomplete