$5 for Freedom

A dream made real:

Yellow cardboard parking pass

Fluttering against my mirror

A bird drawing out its final dusk song

My car’s machinery humming

My hair flicking at my face

Glasses shielding, sliding down my nose

I exit to walk among trees and peace

Past bear scat and huddled breaths

Heat full on my skin and back

Chills with wind in its shifting

I hear a voice pull through that is unlike me,

And my own.

Studied, stuttered hikes through unknown territory:

This is how I am choosing to spend my precious moments

On this earth, asking for forgiveness, transforming guilt into gratitude,

Pressing out my full stomach with every hasty inhale and jagged exhale,

Keeping peace and pace with my heart, my soul.

I feel I am Whitman, or a child-like prophet,

Whose words whisper down like unruly hair.

I wear my mask but off it tumbles, falls, in the face of this natural beauty

Where green meets brown and beneath my feet are sinking sands

That cushion the griefs of the day, the years.

The years go on, and I am just anew—wrinkling, tanning, reddening, enlarging, braving, becoming a new entire being, human in every moment, being as human as I can be.

I cry into the woods and wish for the anticipation to end—of future fears, hates, embarrassments, of unending unknown outcomes.

But the answer is never there—no one finds certainty in here.

And so I cry and cry into the heat and vomit up remorse and wretch in all the glorious pain and rejoice as if I were a religious zealot, the pulpit my birds, my steward the sun, my handkerchief the fallen and growing leaves that never stop.