Brother, Anthill, Synesthetic Kerfuffle

I watch to decipher.  

Endless tangle, to discern how it loops over one stand of itself and back behind another. All itself. It is a painful kind of carefulness to see surely, so that you can follow the path of a single thread or the wild grass. Always is a terrible need to be sure that I know which blade of grass stands before another blade and partially in shadow of another. My eyes are so exhausted of the looking. Yes, I cannot look away.

There are sea cucumbers too, animals I cannot bear. Animals and beings that no one cares to acknowledge in their extreme dignity. According to the faulty minds of many human beings, sea cucumbers are forgettable underwater caterpillar turds named after a vegetable.

But they are. They are selves to themselves and no amount of forgetting will change this. I hope for them that they do not have egos and a kind of feeling that we call emotion. I suspect that even green salad cucumbers have emotion and know they are here. This keeps me awake and burst out of my chest, with so much prickly vine as the cucumber has. I know their their vine and particular leaves, I have felt them so many times. I run outside shouting to people who mistake my certainty for madness. I am waving my arms and yelling that the step between the garden cucumber and the sea cucumber isn’t a step at all. There is no missing link, only Siamese twins.

And the horror in the eyes of the people when they hear of a conjoined being. Oh. A mother could not birth two at once. “Hopefully she is in some country and place that can perform cesarean birth and now what? Those two are they two or are they one?”

Aren’t they like us, sharing one damned singular heart, only they can’t lie about it and hide the sharing of the heart as we do. They can’t pretend they could live if they didn’t share organs. 

Some doctors will study the greater viability of one being over the other, and kill one so another may be discreet. We would be better off of we had four limbs or more, we would look upon centipedes and say, “Brother, how art thou?” 

Walking would be tough, but if there were more of us truly conjoined, we could erase the word compassion from our dictionary. If everything were not taxonomically classifiable, then we would have to throw that book away and stop talking, as the common words would fail us and so we would hum and look at one another and breathe in the middle of the road instead of going somewhere all the time, and then coming back to the same place. 

Anthills would be a giant me, grains of me and all the moving about and forming, also me, and the little finer bits that roll down off that Anyhill-Allhill-Anthill off to the periphery: me too moments.

And floating green clusters, sea weed clinging to more of itself, bound, generating and growing from the mass and also hoping to break away from this thing to. be a separate sea weed…