Ode to Every Ezra I've Been
Ezra, every penny I’ve picked up,
is lucky to see your face.
There I just said it.
The name we call ourselves
without any words. Ezra,
we’ve discovered our bones
are filled with constellations.
How each star is a different way
of saying: I am here, I am here,
I am here and also elsewhere.
Ezra, we’re just weather passing
through bone-light, through marrow-song,
through the space where childhood
keeps our smallest teeth.
How we wake with mouths full.
The barista knows our name
is a season changing, knows
how to pour honey into the dark.
We are brilliant sunsets living
on caffeine rushes, daring
to believe we’re infinite.
Remember last Tuesday,
we found ourself
in the backseat of our car,
watching these hands
grip the steering wheel,
both driver and passenger
in this body that keeps us.
Our hands remembering
being birds, remembering
being thunder.
And here we are, my friend,
this Ezra who dreams of liminality.
Waiting for darkness or dawn
or something to crack open
the sky. But even then, our pulse
keeps time. I’ve forgotten
which version of us belongs
to which timeline of wanting,
as shadows pool in collarbones
like collected stories,
how we keep finding
new rooms in this house
of becoming.
Each morning, we practice
the grammar of transformation:
conjugating to be into,
to transcend into,
to remember into,
to forget into,
to begin again into,
and to begin again.