echo

I am the dream

That chases the daylight

Lurking in the middle ground of thought

Behind the shadows I befriend

That becomes wrinkles

I hope to see down the drain

When I wash my face,

When I scratch the stain away—

Permanent and stubborn

Like the sweet taste of a lost memory



I am the noise

In the silence of the words I speak

When my lips part and tremble

When I sing a rowdy song

Rambling and babbling

Lies and truth interweaved into a prose

Entitled with the letters of my name

I always want forget

But never fail to remember.



I am a broken record

Skipping on the turn table of my world

Recycling, juggling blurry thoughts

That came and gone and back again

Accumulating like fine dust

And giving birth to an artform

For fools,

For the blind

And the faint-hearted.

Who would listen to such tomfoolery?



I am blank and white as a canvas

Bleeding flawed colors into life.

How you will paint me is up to you.

Give me wings, cut my head

Erase me, strip me naked.

I am my own art

But the hand with the brush isn’t mine.



Brush dipped in black paint

Moves across my skin like a dagger

And I vanish with every stroke

And revealed with the very last one—

A blotted image with two legs and two heads,

A heart and a gazillion cells

Converging to create a disembodied echo;

I scream and someone screams back—

It’s me but sometimes it’s someone else.