Outcast of my Own Skin

The loneliness
sometimes it burns

like consciousness
entering a desert
like raw skin
right before you bleed
like hunger
after a free fall
through emptiness
and a thousand eyes watching

listening for the
unconfessed sin
to shatter
and cover the sky in glass
the last pieces trying
to embrace the unforgiving
sun

it’s not that I’ve coveted
and survived a deep blue
negotiation
it’s that I’ve never
really arrived

it’s not that I came,
but that I left

with a plan to love
but without a plan to rest
my head, somewhere

or am I allowed to talk
about the gray parts
of the choices I’ve made?

my convictions are plucked
cold feathers
and my solitude
has swollen feet

the world parades
its many hearts past me
and all the details are
a clamorous blur

with a foreign accent
and deliberate scars
too beautiful to understand
for one so weary