I am living in the margins
of my other people’s days,
passing time with neither
world nor breath to call my own.
Lacking all the solid bones of memory,
and clutching at the ghosts
of sinews that might bind me,
soul to earth,
I drift inside this hard half-space
where vision slides away to dark periphery
and every act is more supposed than seen.
Here, the ways of being me are fled,
and I am only lightly felt by those
whose lives flow past me
as the sand across the stone,
eating me to smooth and small.
Such margins are no place to be alive.
