I AM WHAT I AM AND WHAT AM I?

A poem (or stream of erratic consciousness) about my inevitable decline (or doom) and the many, many, many things (or contradictions) that I am (or am not).

(Art from Pinterest)

Perhaps the best of me is behind,          beyond

that point of irreversibility, a beacon

of inevitability, and it serves as such -

I am no longer shiny or shocking or new 

a brown paper bag, crumpled and creased

milk that sours and curdles, a homesick orphan

A lamb on its back, and I will always be a child

I will always be a child 

Love contorts me, I curve and twist and grow

larger and wider, I am a flesh ball, a balloon 

punctured by a mere prick. I am sensitive,

tuned too tight like my grandmother’s piano

but it was the first I ever played so no other

sounds right, and I tell my first love the same thing

I am entropy,      the blaze of a sun,     a deity of delusion

a fickle fig,                             (pick, peel, devour)  

I am a tear in your jeans       a loose thread,        a love-sick sack,          

a daughter,                           (and some days,  a mother)

I am tin teeth,      a blade in your belly,     a hive in your head

a feeble fawn,                      (a black bull) 

I am an amalgamation of deficiency and divinity,

coarse and common as coal. I am the sun, the nether, 

the shade under rock, I am nothing, nothing at all.