There is a tea shop,
in an old building, with a hand-plastered tile floor.
Small cream and yellow squares break off every day under sock-clad feet.
Umbrellas litter the floor on rainy days, but no one trips.
I sit, drinking a tea like soil,
as the leaves stir in my memory.
My bare feet are rooted on the tile floor while also walking the smooth floor of a temple.
I close my dueling eyes like fluttering wings
to become only this.
My body is in the tea shop, sipping, but only the building is a brick portal,
while I am only a feeling.
I have often found,
in the way my eyes blink nervously, and then flutter open again,
that the faces around me have changed.
I am at a sunny picnic day that is familiar like a memory, but it hasn’t happened yet. The landscape is familiar, as is the house, but I have never been there. Yellow flowers…
Later, breathing deep breaths beneath my breath, beneath the warm breezes outside the shop, as I look at city lights just to be, to just be, without the pressure to create, achieve, and impress,
I think about and wonder when will I ever find myself in this ocean.
I wear a maroon hoodie with arms crossed, strands of hair across my face.
Today, and on days when the smoky sun begins to collapse all around me I am like, “maybe tomorrow I’ll be satisfied.”
My body is a tea pot,
and every morning, I throw the covers off of me, and I throw off the lid of this tea pot, because I am not done yet,
only misplaced.