deer die with their eyes wide open

i'm words. nothing but words, a walking dictionary of personality traits and a directory of names: (a)lex and teal and ridley-kristen and even the old one, the first one, jammed down among our ribs, stuffed at the base of our spine and down into in our guts, old-blood dried up and sunk under the new
 

from a formal viewpoint i guess my personality is not really "alex is" or even "i am" but "inside me there is" because we are not entirely a person or even people!! not a shape defined by its edges, not colour within the lines, we are edgeless and shapeless and without-boundaries of self, we are colour spilling, ink bleeding, raw emotion and clinical thought and
 

things full of so many things and at any given time we are more of one thing than another but that does not take any of them away!! it only carries them off in our blood, sweeps them into our bones where they cling like wet-seaweed to sand but in the end they are always carried back, just a constant inner tide of ebbing and flowing always and sometimes it lies low and calm and sometimes it foams and crashes but it is us either way
 

we are water and wind, the sea and the sky, both and neither and all roads between; we are the line of the horizon between endless light and ever-growing life and our soul is made of silver and gold, rubies and emeralds, gleaming like stars and that is what we are! we are stardust from a million years away, broken down into infinite unfathomably tiny pieces and drifted to Earth like snow or ash and the soil and water and light have brought it all back together again, rearranged us with white-tan skin and pink flesh and bubbling blood and heavy heavy bones but beyond them we could be weightless and maybe one day when our dust breaks down and sets to travel again that is exactly what we will be
 

we are the prince of a kingdom of stars and on Earth we are young and small but beyond this, among the stars, we are younger and smaller, infinitely so, a speck of nothing rubbing its raw-eyes, blinking and forever reborn, in the face of incomprehensible time and distance. but the difference is that here that distance is daunting — out there, it cradles us. in it we are both the tiniest fly buzzing unheard and the spider with its long spindly legs and its sharp eyes spinning webs between the dots of stars in which to catch solar winds.
 

dust in our veins and dust on our bones and in the back of our skull and in our mouth, we are made of dust, but it is dust that sometimes we swear we catch on the back-end of tingling, glittering. singing.