my mother always said that we see in the world
whatever we want to see
reality is shaped by our perception
but my eyeballs don’t
reach out into the world like
fingers
molding clay into concept
or concept into clay
and if they do
they are more like slippery blind tendrils
soft and webbed and glassy
scooping wet sand into sloppy castles
only to get lapped up by the tide
in cycles
not spiteful or cruel but indifferent
as the moon plays tug-of-war with the earth
in their little game of gravity
in nature there are no wins or losses
i think
only survival
which is always a tie
not in the sense of a stalemate
but in the sense of an everloving push and pull
dynamic never static
our eyeballs decided
on the ideas of predator and prey
once upon a time
as gravity hunted the tide
and desire hunted need
and need hunted wholeness
it was our eyeballs
who decided to conquer land and body
to make sandcastles from concepts
to make concepts from fingers
to make fingers from eyeballs
to play tug-of-war with time
as we immortalize some version of ourselves
by marrying the spiritual to the physical
to play hide-and-seek with wholeness
as we separate colors by morals
fractured light and fractured language
abstract into concrete
concrete into abstract
i into me into you into other
so i stand here on the shore
where water meets moon meets earth meets air
meets the smell of salt and sunscreen
meets me
windblown in the pursuit of catching color
in the breeze
slipping through closed fist or open hand
so i keep digging determinedly
sculpting architecture out of the guts of hourglasses
perpetually rebuilding as parts get washed away
staring into the water at a fractured reflection
never still never separated
scattered by light and language
hunting wholeness
hunting whatever it is
that i want to see