Citizen

What makes a citizen? Who decides? Who doesn’t belong, and who, legitimized, never considers it.

What makes a person? Their flesh, their thoughts?

How long will it take for me to become a citizen? The grass that I stand on does not grow for me; the air, reserved for someone else. The earth, the seeds, have been nourished by hostile soil, so that no matter how I toil I am not here. Transience, such a funny thought.

The branches all point in the same direction: away.

Paper tells me things that I cannot believe. And so I dig, deeper, deeper, searching, imploring these pages, these words to tell me what I know is there: valleys, unseen, hiding, affecting gravity.

Gullies in the fields, spaces in the equality that is described on the pages that I read.

And so I ask, what makes a citizen? The land they own? Do they stand alone? Do they need the outside to define their own? Like a home, does its structure protect what is inside?

I turn to the soil, that births the wood from which the house’s outside is derived: but the wood is hollow, lacking detail, monotone. Its song, thin and dry.

And the builders forgot so many things.