Caitlin Johnstone

Gnomes And Gear Monsters

He keeps telling me that I am beautiful,
but how can that be?

I am just two transparent noses
and some hands sometimes,
and occasionally a lap when I am sitting.

He is the beauty in the universe,
clearly,
with his forrest god hair and primordial eyes.
I’m just blinking eyelids
and whatever’s behind my eyeballs
(gnomes and gear monsters, maybe).

His hand extends into my field of vision
and mine arises to meet it,
and he leads me to a dark downward-spiraling staircase.

We hold triceratops horn torches dipped in fire bee honey.

“Why do we have to go this way?” I ask,
already following him down.

“It’s where the next thing is,”
he replies.

We discover a molten jungle
where we are given a potion by an ancient worm
which makes us vomit up the lies our parents taught us.

We laugh and laugh
and wipe shame from our chins
and connect the galaxies in our foreheads
in the wilderness
together.

We are all always teetering on the brink of great adventure,
balancing on the heel of one foot
and waving our arms like maniacs
to keep from toppling over and plunging in
to profundity.

All it takes is a slight breeze,
a brush with death,
a full-bodied howl of sincere desperation,
an unexpected moment of stillness,
a heroic dose of psilocybin,
or a beautiful boy taking your hand
to send you over the edge
where the old once-important stories
go skittering across the floor like spilled marbles
and your gaze turns up at last
to the uncharted.

We fight our way back home
and he wipes orc oil from his sword.
I stitch his wounds with spider thread,
then I open a door behind my eyeballs
and beckon him inward.

“What’s that?”

“The next thing,” I reply.

________________________

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