survey, delineate, and deckle

Recently, I was told I’m very good at setting boundaries.

In the moment, it felt like a compliment-

probably because I was so low, I craved an admiration.

I’ve been rolling around my thoughts since then;

holding my life’s map at arm length, squinting, checking borders, securing provinces. 

Noticed that desert warms beside glacier. 

Farmland feeds rainforest. 

Rock crumbles, dust falls across margins- I absently brush the bits aside. 

Do you see my idiosyncratic landscape as boxed and nonsensical?

No anticlines or synclines.

A spineless mantle, long recovered from tectonics. 

Water runs aside arbitrary berms. 

Sediment slides sideways, so I tilt the page, bend and fold trying to direct and limit damage. 

A map made from projection not exploration. 

And fossils emerge, growling from being buried alive.