I breathe human through my fingers
I breathe human through my fingers. Am otherwise thin eyed and patient,
reading existence as a brush of listless wind.
The tongue of creation may translate my hungers and a dull vicious calm.
Many hours I cannot sense what draws me and persist then in echoes.
I walk into the tide searching death and tangle my organs in
deep morning cold excavations cutting under my animal agenda and heart.
My lungs are strong and mind ties a needle taut north on goal
until the heart attack afternoon or a drowning.
Inside I am mostly heavy static, but create and feel I should,
should anything because the clear world whirls madness.
The god of goodness innate has been shredded,
never stood whole but there are traces she touched and I may be some.
Become shaking moments and desperation. I wish for anything in the world.
Since living in Seattle these nine months I have learned
that I do not love nature as once thought I could.
Despite a brief wash of euphoric solidarity,
it is not possible for me to love the world and all its passengers.
I shall never relinquish that hope for love,
even unfeeling in the midst of beauty and truth.
I'll acknowledge and perhaps reach there slowly.
I have confused myself with doubts on the emptiness of total meaning.
Whether my path is ineffectual compared against
what justice I might sew if my strengths were applied elsewhere.
I convince myself with fear and escapefulness of
there is no pure good. No option only to heal or live as a clean breath in smoke.
Any pursuit is equal shoutings against a clamped palm
until the ocean floats over your stunned and naked body.
And I feel nothing. Mumbling with my slit-up shins in the brine and
stars clatter overhead like spoons in a shutting drawer. Our Earth is
the shadow of an insect lost on paper white fields, so minuscule and
wandering pangs of connection or knotted in violence hunger
![Rats Trujillo Rats Trujillo](https://www.unlikelystories.org/sites/default/files/rats_trujillo.jpg)
Rats Alice Trujillo is the author of two books and many zines of poems. They live and work in Seattle.