Jaymee Thomas | + Follow Poet |
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I See Myself in Everything

I endure my arrogance like a leftover twin  
absorbed during gestation,  
seeing myself in everything, not only the eyes  
that watch me rocking back and forth in a corner 
in order to flip my house right-side up.  
What’s left on the roadside is me, too.

I am wholly grateful for the retrospect when I listen,  
slump-cheeked and reddening with introspective embarrassment,  
dumb as an eyeball glaring down the barrel of a mandatory gavel,
self-awareness knows when you know they got you.

Argumentation is the art of capitulating as a sail 
pulling down your head in a strong wind, 
it's knowing when to go method, get Zen. 

It is the biggest picture, zoomed in to view a passage,  
out to capture rainfall in a tarp, knowing  
the ocean won’t miss a few drops, 
let's call it a potion.

Of my arrogance and I, our story, I will it 
to the lowest bidder, as sinners seeking 
asylum in an empyrean reliquary,  
only the meek may enter,
my barrier is wrestling whether an artist should
be making their own bed in the morning
like a rusted hinge I stay pinned to the mattress
grasping at a careworn comforter, with both hands
weighing the gravity of the imbalance, the divisions
of labor unfavoring the languishing necessary
to push past the paralysis.  

I will that our seizing be taken for breathing  
and leaves us to being, finally, at rest
with ourselves.

Without intervention of opinion, although taken  
with salt, is a different flavor of reason that brings us  
to an alphabet soup I see myself in, because this soup,  
too is part of the arrogant everything I earlier mentioned
is my twin.

Copyright © Jaymee Thomas | Year Posted 2024

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