Don't Sell What's Mine

You can sell all your childhood playthings. You can sell the patches off your clothes if it brings you profit. Is the icy wind on your skin going to make you happy?

I thought not.

What holds my words? My brain can't. My paper can, and so I save old notebooks. What lets me write in every color? My pen can't. Seven or eight or nine couldn't, and so I need every marker and colored pencil and crayon. What keeps treasured remembrances warm? My memory can't. Letting a forgotten object wander back in time to its most treasured place can, and so I keep all sorts of things.

Who can predict the future? No prophet but the past. Where is my future? Where is my past? They're all around me. They burn out of my head and enflame my desk. They're branded all over the walls. They smoke into my pages and smolder on the floor. You call me sloppy and you say I'm a hoarder. I'll never be a simple person. How could I be? I'm alive.

Maybe your mind made you all that you are. Perhaps your psyche is perfectly organized. But is your inner self is a mosaique that lives in full color, that blazes all around you? Are you part of your room? When your foot brushes a tile, does it explode and become your very own? Do you inhabit the very air? Do you blaze in my pupils, do you sunbathe in the very word you write?

I thought not.

Your head is full of canal locks. Your soul isn't worth as much if it's shriveled from the cold, you know.