to be free and wild and soft, so soft and silent but not too silent lest you be too alone. alone is good, and clean, and simple, without complication, no one to disappoint, to fail and ruin. no others to forget, no others to remember, no one to remind you that you too are alive and you too must eat and drink and sleep. to be alone is to be immortal, and to be immortal is to live until proven otherwise. to be alone, you may forget death and yet still embrace it, for death is a lonely companion to have. without death you are alone, with it you are just the same. to live, perhaps, is to process time, a river polluted with tears unwillingly shed, wrung from joyful eyes. to float along, content in the knowledge of the real, what has happened and will happen and cannot be un-happened, along the path to a future tainted and clean and, perhaps, perhaps, acknowledged. to grow roots into a ground intent on pushing you out, to force out branches and be woven with vines and decked with leaves. will you bear fruit? burst forth blossoms, fragrant and stinking, visited by flies and honeybees and wasps to frighten children with flowers in their hair. later grow heavy and swollen with sterile seed wrapped in painful flesh, swept into the floorboards underneath a stained porch, perhaps eaten and shat out and decomposed, uselessly, back into the earth. there is no light there, no pollinators to visit the blossoms that will never grow. no, you may well be a weed in the grass, pulled out and stomped on or clinging, tenuously, believing you live in a world that may just let you live. perhaps then you evolve so that if one part is pulled the rest might remain. you break away, to die, but some of you may still grow. or even, to push out between blocks of concrete, stepped on or sprayed with poison, or photographed for someone’s photo journal. perhaps even then you will flower, sunny yellow head reaching out for someone- anyone- for without the sun and without the water and the flies and bees and wasps you will die and never leave anything behind. perhaps to be free, you must remain alone yet never lonely, to live, you must die, and to be immortal to be remembered.

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