Lines

Sometimes at night I have dreams

where I’m wholly within my

 20 year old frame 

and thoughts,

   still unformed like 

the sand surrounding a child 

before a castle is born.

I fully feel, 

feel fully, the expectation of life 

and love and loss and the 

lingering sense of not knowing 

and only beginning to know.

Stuffed with childhood and wonder.

A soul like a telescope searching outward 

         for discovery and

stretching to bring the outside world

in.

Then I awake with a small, 

squishy skin of a child

nestled next to my frame that has 

            sense walked like one with pails of water -

but sloshing inside is the archives of a full grown 

woman.

Shapes and hips and forehead lines 

can’t deceive that which was felt in a dream.

She can’t run from all the days piled up like sand,

forming the walls and windows and pillars with castle like peaks.

You can’t undue

 womanhood. 

You can’t expect the wave to 

               wash it away - 

because the seaside of time isn’t cyclical in a 24 hour way.

No 

now, where time lives in the skin, 

in the brain, 

in the depths -

One must pull from within 

out, out, out

and let the sound of a one woman history 

give of itself.

Let others drink the water and

    take residence in the castle of the

Life

You’ve 

Built.

Of days and days

Of sand and soul :

Lines connecting then to the here and now.