currently untitled poem

Not entirely certain this is finished, but a long chunk of poem nonetheless. No title just yet, and a little more direct than the last one.


Walking is my way to
fly. Lifted,
effortless, drawn.
Personal and isolated.
I could disappear
in the air, the streets
or the landscape.
It is, too, all
noise. Movement
has a voice, sound
has a voice, temperature
has a voice, my body
has a voice. All those
voices are thoughts
and lead to thoughts. Oppositions.
Outside and wholly
in the world. Exhausted
and able to walk
the day. Near fugue-
state and churning thoughts.
Time cracks. The endless
present weighs
more and held closer.
The immediate past
in chunks. Each and the present
joined to similar moments
gone. To weather,
thoughts, topography, circumstance.
Routes through
split and spiral. I lose
the sense of now.
Somewhere now
comes back. Everything
bulging out with new
reality. There's something
strange and mutable
about place. Even at
the level of physically limited
and defined places. As place,
does my apartment end
at the walls or incorporate
all I can see
and hear? As setting,
as 'here', not possession.
And when place becomes
town, village, city; legal,
financial, administrative entity;
community; history; contiguous
with other places,
the strangeness and mutability deepens.
Walking is art. A dig,
an exploration. Interrogating
these slices of place
and time. Looking
for questions in preference to
answers. Finding ways to frame
thoughts, sensations. Knowing
all the time this
moment this place changes
constantly, will be different
next time I pass.
And I am changed
in turn. The interrogation
shifts, recedes as soon
as it makes progress.