Mictli could never understand why it was that people didn’t seem to want to take the time to know one another. Sometimes he wondered if they heard each other at all, or if they were mostly terrified to listen, terrified to hear the stories that the world has been trying to tell itself since it began. Afraid of having to rebuild, to destroy, to question, to become something new. Or maybe the constant rush and mumble was a self-comforting behavior, like rocking yourself to sleep under your blanket on your knees.

Sometimes when he entered society, he felt as if he were moving on a different temporal plane, as if he couldn’t catch up with people. Probably why they had put him in all the advanced classes as a child. They mistook his utter inability to make sense of how one was supposed to do things with originality.

He needed time to look things over. Things change shape even when you notice them. The world talks back to you at all times. But you have to be listening for it, watching for it. Were people really so brilliant that they got everything about everything so very fast? To Mictli, it seemed that before he could make up his own mind about a moment, others had ruled on it. He learned to move with them, lift his eyebrows properly and then offer his own similar thoughts. He became very good at this. Sometimes he’d completely forget that he was playing along. Sometimes he mistook himself for the reflections cast by his earthly form. Sometimes he lost the boundary between his own aching arms and that of the silhouette of the televised conductor.

The man had stopped talking about Brown University, or the seismic sensors in the shed, and was plucking tines now with someone else. Mictli felt the sun fall on his cheek as he turned to walk back home. He felt the blue of morning roaring through his bones. Holding his paper bag close to his side, he stepped through the automatic door.

The air from outside washed over him with a faint pear scent that he could not place. The world is always a garden, too, he thought. He imagined his smile as a tiny hawk, soaring through the sky of his mind.

my body for you
my bones for you
my blood, my heat, my breath for you
i spend it like a child throwing coin in arcades
i wake up and run
along gold dusted paths green shade and torn feet skimming dew laden glade
my life for you and i slam toward the sun

if i burn up chasing stars
because i need to throw them sideways at mute tanks and stone faced fakes
then i’ll turn to smoke laughing
hover over your shoulders and hair
when you feel you’re alone and nobody cares
bristlebrush honeycomb tangerine
fist in the air junglerudder in the stream
you are the stuff of a guerrilleros dream