12.9b

I used to live outside every day. When I see the stars or the light through the clouds or a sunset on hills, I pause for a breath so short I choke on it, and say I used to live outside every day I look around at the untold stories of vaprous morning airs drifting through long pines and with the world I exhale the aching truth of my past, when I used to live outside every day the house creeps in on me in closing circles of anthropogenic wood and rock, an obscene reminder of the fact that I used to live outside every day the soft chant of the weather tapped its methodic rhythm on the outside of my skull to communicate in the only way it knew how of the permanency of my position in the world and the immediacy of my knowledge of it and the brevity of my time in which it was true that I used to live outside every day the pattern of my life appears more set, more foreign to that time when the night air was my window to God and the sound of urgency was an incomprehensible tongue that spoke only in terms that I could understand because I used to live outside every day. I am circumscribed by this, I am losing words to it, I am trumcated, and the truth is: I used to live.