By Austin Anthony

I am just wild enough. I make sure of it.
Underneath my roof is a small eternity
filled with ancient species searching for water.
We are all fiction.
Chameleons slowly fall in a row,
down to the pipes, and the wind vanes
& the zoo walls.
Calling someone else; I put my hand down—
oh, how we all become the apartments
where we were born.
And the hospital bed, transfixed on the idea
of being each alleway
& each piece of half-carved wood—
each satellite view. To see so much.
This is a humane ecosystem:
my mother calling me back down from outside,
calling me latterly while I just dive back in again—
Is this who I am?
I know how to be young.
To sail every single piece of water in sight,
to turn it all into an ocean,
to turn it into 18 little summers before
the fish stop singing and flying
and just begin to swim. Please, tell me:
why must it make sense to be real?
I still live within the jungle; I still make the rules.
There is a circle of animals
spinning above the cradle on strings—
fragile shimmers of light,
searching for an eye on which to be beheld.
I am right here.
I know how to sail through all these years.
I will still watch.
I will always come back.
Once, a good boy you were—
now we’re just people we’ve never met.
Sitting inside damper structures
which were never conceived.
It tips over in the nighttime.
This was never born.
It was never called back down for dinner.
It never once smiled. Oh, well.
Wilderness may still come.
God is a triumph. I was told to wait.
I was told it was merely evolutionary.
And then, suddenly, it shall all appear as may be—
trumpets entering rooms 1 by 1,
nature has been created for the second time.
“You’re only 16,” but now,
all the wilder things just turn me
back into public housing.
Me & my love, morphing into gray walls—
docile and domesticated;
we are just waiting to be painted over.
Still sitting on the same floral armchairs,
still preparing our same daily sandwiches,
and our same tea
and then dying the same death.
I find that my fingers are growing a liking to
the clutch that holds within
these computer keys—
its beautiful unnaturality. Though,
a baby kangaroo climbs up my shoulder
& claws my neck.
It asks if it will be remembered.
There is destruction out here circling
as waves of fog.
It is coming down over each hill.
It is not going; it is not gone—
It is creating something new.

–

Austin Anthony is a 17 year old writer from Texas. He loves poetry, music, and film.