Salvaged from the gray

She tells me, “You are nothing”
And in this place, I am not,
But I am.

Where transparent I have existed
Where bodiless I have form

You tell me, “You will wander,
but will not find.”

I have wandered and have not found.

But in seeking I have seen
I have heard
And come to know the Earth
And all her kindred souls

She is wise
and I have been made wiser

Through forests I may run to bend the pines
Through deserts I may carve the sands
Through oceans I may ripple the seas
Through canyons I may ricochet off rock and roost
Through leaves and grass I may rise and fall
And through day and night I will never give pause

Perhaps I have become more than ‘nothing’
Even if my appearance is deceiving
Even if I am as clear as glass

We are all at one time lost
but we are certainly not nothing

Singularity

There is something
quite different
about today.
I feel like time
has stopped alluding
to the moment
ahead.

I feel like it has left
my senses open:
the city doesn’t close
in on me;
the cars don’t break
the calm;
the air breaths
into me
as I fill my lungs.

I am at a loss, though,
as to why this moment should
be special?
So even if I can’t
put a finger on exactly why,
- I’ve concluded this:

These moments you remember,
they are like those
childhood memories
of playing on your favorite tree,
of racing down the school hallway
or,
- like today,
of standing out on the street,
waiting for the traffic
to pass by.

They may not seem particularly
special,
but they are,
in my reckoning of it,
the singular moments
that define who and what
you are.

And right now,
what I have felt,
is but the very instance
- change (!)
disturbed reality;
the very moment
I became
more than I was.

***I lost most of this poem, so it was a difficult test to accept a different version of what I first imagined. And, yet, it is always healthy to try.