By Viviana Sanchez, TIWP Student

Bones and marrow

Flesh and blood

The conscious mind

A mental bind

The river of letters

Forming the sound structures of my sentences

There is no reason, no time

Between metaphysical and what is under our finger tips

The reason we write is to sing with no voice

To paint with no brush

To tell with 26 symbols

It is a dance of pixels

An army of swift ink movements

We are nothing more than the after-image of our words

The sun-burned flash of an eye

The silence after a lie

We cannot scoop up our experiences

We cannot transport our memories

Nor can we truly capture the truth of a moment

Instead we have to write it down

And sculpt it into something three dimensional

A pillow’s feather in the air, a lock of hair behind your ear

Touch of face

Your lips, your legs

You’re solid

Right? Why?

Protons, shifting and quaking but holding tight

If you believe that you must believe this

Once there was nothing, then some glitch in adding zero and zero caused

A singularity, a bang

A really large bang, a big bang

Then every particle that ever has or ever will exist was formed and showered down in the nothingnesses, you along with it

Earth was formed shortly after this radioactive spacial ballet 

Since then, ever single twitch and tremble of every leaf to live has led to this moment

You are protons, formed in the formation of existence

You are billions of years old

Consciousness has only come to you recently, but the taste of space will linger on your tongue

You sit upon your skeleton and shift

You are always moving

The tendrils of muscle that dwell inside your arm stretch as your writing upon your page

Your eyelashes automatically brush your face

Your tongue twitches

Your lips rearrange themselves

We write to notice the hairs on our arms catch the light

We write to touch the damp, cold, and dirty bottoms of creek rocks

We write to smell the rust on stop signs

We write to touch the protons and grab the light and really feel life in a way breathing cannot manage

We write to feel the plush texture of another word

We write to notice every blade of grass under our backs

We write to explain the words we could not say

We write to comprehend an incomprehensible existence

We write to live