In the great book of inside jokes,

Someone pressed me like a flower.

My colors have bled into 42 pages

And I have dehumectified.

I saunter now from pen to pen

To clean the animals’ cages at the zoo.

The big cats, with their sticky poo,

Prickle my nose with ammonia.

My mind has become as the dung of gazelle,

A dry turd that doesn’t attach to anything,

An odorless, tasteless void to carry ideas

And drop them unchanged along the way.

I created all the authorities that ever lived  in my head,

And I pretended to obey them.

Like a hypocrite,

I give validity to my lower self.

But when I drop all of that,

I see my lower self is just a phony, too.

There is no zookeeper following me.

There’s only one me here.

I empty myself of everything else 

And here I stand true,

Purely coded,

Like a fertilized egg,

Attached only to the great womb 

Of the cosmos

And growing.

Growing,

Waiting to be born again,

As I go from pen to pen

Cleaning the animals’ cages.

-jenn