this is a poem I wrote. it's kind of weird. but I kind of like it, too.

I’ve been to the top of the world,

and I’ll tell you – it’s not what

you’d imagine it to be.

I climbed up piles of dirt and ash,

got the soot of that high place

all over my eyelids,

in the crevices of my elbows

and under the bend of my tongue,

up to the point of tasting it,

up to the point of sticking my finger

in my ear and discovering all sorts

of debris there, inside my skull.

You might not believe it,

but there was fog up there.

I thought I’d see everything

ever made, you know?

Like there would be lights

twinkling and other small romantic

details I’d want to write you about

on a postcard, and I’d describe them

like I was writing a poem, and you’d

stand in your driveway reading it and

think, “gosh, I wish I was there with you,

seeing these beautiful things.”

but when I was up there, there was this fog.

The higher I hiked the more it touched

my skin, like went into it touched,

like suffocated my pores,

like I couldn’t see even my own hand waving

in front of my eyes, and it was all dark

up there. These little droplets of water

that came from God-knows-where settled

on my eyelashes, and my blue raincoat

pressed against my arm, kind of sticky feeling.

when I was up there, I thought for awhile

that maybe all the black molten waste

was something more just a tragic death

everyone calls lovely like Juliet,

but it was just black molten waste.

I couldn’t love it, that high place

because it was lonely up there.

It was steep up there,

when my foot touched the sides of the rocks

and small bits fell over the edge, I thought

of falling and I think that if I fell from up there,

I’d fall in slow-motion like movies,

and the background would fade into these

strange colors or clouds or something.

I thought about writing you

that postcard, thought about

throwing it down from the

height to see if it’d glide

straight into your mailbox,

and you’d put it on the fridge

where you’d notice it only as you

were getting out a slice of cheese

or storing away the left-over pesto pasta

you like so much.

it’d sit there underneath a magnet

they gave you for free at the grocery store,

and you’d pretend I was having the time of my life,

pretend with a little smile and picture me

dancing in a luau up on the heights of creation

when really the words I wrote you

on the postcard said

“the view isn’t so great from up here.”