Salt Lines and Name Tags

The dawning of a black mask;
Gender, interests, and breathing
are blown away like
the dust on a movie prop fossil.

This is a luxury.
The name tag must be legible and aptly placed
in order to abandon these notions.
It's a space walk with the promise of coming home.

The world is limiting in this state.
There is no checking my reflection;
I either am, or I am not; my pulse either is, or it isn't.
It's pure, it's lifeless, it's without trouble.

This colorless world of 'mask on face' and 'eyelash in eye'
is one of tranquil simplicity and inner most thought.
To lift the veil off of stick man and woman
is to doom humanity but accept it's many flavors.

Neutrality condemns the mind to become a cartographer,
striving for exactness, knowing what's to come after.
Normality breeds the drunken ship captain,
following distant dying ideas towards a shadowy concept of something better.

So, I take off my hood and sniff out a Candy man.
He sits in a spot of sun, with a blank name tag on his back.
His hands bleed into the sky,
as his forehead drips into the bays of America.

There are salt lines on his shirt and there is paper on his tongue.

He throws me a line made of fish nets and hair.
I hold on and smell
the forgotten beer in the cracks of the street,
and the buttermilk body soap that comes after.

I hang myself to dry on a telephone line,
opening my home like a doll house for the world to see.
This world is full of reality TV
and sophomoric animals who seem to see in color.

The hand of off brand Yahweh
paints my plastic eyes open; I never sleep.
The same hand makes me choose between
breathing, bathing, eating, writing, and reading.

There is only time for two activities in this world,
as recess always runs short,
and His patience was born thin;
I must choose wisely.

Keegan Shaw 5/27/20