Poem: February 3, 2019

Every Atom Belonging to Me, As Good Belongs to You

The me-ness of me is constructed of recycled parts,
of atoms that separately once belonged to some other piece
of our universe. Imagine each atom rising from a collapsing form,
a phoenix taking flight, wandering through the spacious crowd
of reality, until it finds the next gathering that it will call home.
I am the father-nation of refugees, of the repurposed and found.
Each bit of me an infinite story, the whole of me a state of flux.
I like to imagine the population of me, its origins formed
from former blades of grass and book bindings, from the strings
of a lost Stradivarius and the sand from a beach in the Keys.
Why wouldn't some part of me have been worn by Whitman,
smeared across a canvas by Monet, or smoked by Jimi Hendrix?
I have gathered to me the essences of starlight and shade.
I include the blue of eyes and the hardness of quartz. I am
a multitude of source material, the crux of billions of stories.
Touch my hand and you can feel worlds brought together,
a wondrous, accidental conclave. The museum of was.
And I move my cabinet of curiosities through the world,
redistributing my wild garden through acts of beautiful decay.