Essence

When you squeeze something down to its oil -

lavender or parsley or teakwood -

you get a more sticky and smelly version

like lavender syrup,

which you pour on whatever you want to be more lavender-y.

What is my oil? My syrup?

And to what would anyone apply it?

Why make something more like me?

I used to think that if someone could be dropped into my mind for just a moment,

they would go insane–

too electrocuted by the pessimism,

too instantaneously drowned in ideas.

“Come, do not be afraid,” I’d say to my mental visitor.

“It is frightening, but it is habitable.”

Under what conditions can a mind survive in such deep, stewing thought,

so parked away from what’s daily acceptable to these troves of marching humans,

like a speck of rotting food,

deep in the compost heap, far from the last glimpse of light,

in just the moment before it is turned into soil.

If you want to know what it feels like to be me,

clench your front teeth and your eyes,

go to the darkest place you can find,

and then in a moment,

open it all to the sunrise,

and be saved by the wet grass,

the simple yellow of a cloud.

My oil would be what leaked from that compost heap.

It smells of old leaves and dying things

but if it’s poured over a garden it will make delicious tomatoes.

Oh and my dream last night

when I flew around in a helicopter

frustrated with my dad

looking for my homeland.

I suppose characters of this dream

are who’d apply my oil

to their wrists and their necks,

to become real

to come out of my mind and into the world.

To become soil

under grass

under yellow clouds

in the sunrise.