it’s me, an alien

oh, my body is irradiated.
there’s something in the eye of this storm, and i can tell because my shoulders reek of fatigue
and the light is bending and arcing into my fingertips, telling stories about the
awful things we’ve heard that only other people have seen. i have been bearing witness to sincere grief and it has been tangling my dna into something resembling double dutch braids. i don’t know that i’m doing the work so much as i’m living it.

i think i’ve earned the right to my cynicism and distance, though:
my psychic tells me this is my seven hundred and eightieth life so it is no wonder that the
old age conservatism of my father is still keeping
me upright and dressed down in my mind. and the other something old, the tradition that belongs to my people on my mother’s side, it’s inaccessible to me.
there is something to be said about patrimony,
the fathering i’ve been forcing myself to do,
the nonsensical gaps i’ve been seeing
between this life and the next. there’s a useless glow
of visions that i have nowhere to put but here, and it’s all i have.

mortality has been angering me lately:
all the ways i’ve been dying without leaving my body do not count for anything, to anyone.
my guardian angels, who are aware of these things,
are simply me in other dimensional forms
so there is a sarcasm
and intentional impartiality that informs their scientific (and mostly experimental) protection and loving.

without fear or favor, they come inside me,
and the body flushes
and activates something more expansive than i can perceive.
the starlight within all of us is something wonderful, so grand,
and the momentary ecstatic transcendence i feel
is hysterically overwhelming. we forget the power we have until it roars awake just quick enough to keep us from impact, fragmentation.

in that quiet dark where
i shudder and cry,
it feels good and humbling and not at all a reminder of the cosmic joke i keep reinforcing. no, the angels are lively if not impersonal, and they do not so much value love and grace as they do value simply doing their job. they nurture my spirit the way we turn the light off when we leave a room. it is more of a practical, saving on expenses thing.

i tell no one about the ways my body has been
inventing new ways to betray me, and the
combatants that come around to fight it on my behalf now and then. my soul and the
physicality of this vehicle are star-crossed lovers
and me, the in-between of them, the translator,
i am for the most part making it up as i go and not helping anyone help me at all.
i do not tell my loved ones about the
ways i’ve engaged and quickened these processes
several times over because i am certain they would
never believe it — not me, not one so deeply engaged
in trying to heal and explain everyone else’s problems
to them so they can heal, too.

my angels said i am something of a luddite,
hesitant to throw myself into an actual revolution, despite the performance of non-conformity.
they explain this process of how i can pay my debts letter by letter,
the seeding and watering and planting and birthing,
yet i am still stuck here, the soil filling my shoes,
still too nervous to leave solid ground.
come harvest time let the boys dig me open wide, too,
let them do what they must do, even if i’ve produced nothing. i will be upward somewhere. you can have my losses at least.

i mean this sincerely: i regret coming out of the womb
without a compass on my heart. this is standard, of course, and by design: who wants to search for treasure if they’ve already seen it and tasted it and known it a thousand times before?
instead i look up at the sky blue, follow those gorgeous beasts
of water, their daytime bodies so soft and sweet, and imagine living amongst their kind.
tell me you’ve never wanted to know the dance of purpose, the weightlessness of faith?
there’s an eclipse somewhere on another planet,
and i feel it now, the way our hearts are connected
to those two suns.
i seem to be colliding with people, on purpose.
i seem to be seeing you before i’ve known you.
and if it’s the feral little ones
taking our mandarins on the shoreline
(who keep telling me your name)
then i will have to live with it all without saying it, won’t i?