national route one running from ear to ear is tangled with junctions
leading in all directions.
my eyes are ports of entry filled with immigrant images filling out files,
a waiting backlog of everything i haven't seen yet weighs on my brow.

from my head to my fingers and my heart to my lips run lanes upon lanes of
perpetual bumper to bumper highway snarls.
my throat is clogged with the smog
of too much traffic.

my skin is a landscape of farms and forests,
scars dotting hills like strip mines.
my legs like mobile peninsulas meet at a hill
thickly wooded with perpetually bare trees.
i am deciduous.

get to know these landmarks. memorize them.
with time this map will crease and fade,
you will no longer be able to make out the names of islands and rivers.
don't try to re-record my tumbling landscape.
the last thing i need is another cartographer.

just travel this topography wearing sturdy shoes and your tent on your back,
carefully tend the little fires you make,
and then,
be an ocean for my island;
a listening isthmus through the roughly tumbling
baltic blue of the sea.