It seems the folks who are judged the most critically in this world are the ones who can’t manage to walk the straight and narrow.

The beaten down way.

The paved and pummeled path.

Today, from the foggy edge of a willow, I was reminded,

a majority of the map lies outside of those highways and trails.

The lie ways and fails.

Look at a map and ingest the whole space.

The fathomable universe contains those strands of subjugation, 

and everything outside of the lines.

But, those who wander out there are condemned.

These are the folks who’ve learned the lessons out there that most will never find in actuality but will someday find they essentially need.

Out there is where the soul meets the sand and bright moss,

where things are damp and glistening and fresh.

Where things are soft and fragrant and wildly new.

Where senses dulled with droll, wake up.

Where we remember how a certain haze of light feels as it swallows us,

where we feel with our hearts again.

Into the wild is where your mind wants to wander when the hum and rhythm of mundane and uniform steps taken in unison dry your spirit and numb your consciousness.

Where echoes focus and connections tighten.

Where dulled things become bright and sharp again.

Uniformity will leave your heart thirsting.

The truth has never been on the main roads and byways.

They’ve always found it while lost in the wilderness.

Somehow those are the lessons we scoff at from the road.

My bare feet and raw senses can’t exist in that state.

The order is what caused me the most harm.

The masses walking those safe zones and tarred lanes may as well have buried me underneath them.

The way they are when they’re together is like watching sickness march forward toward agony and doom, yet they want to drag me along with them as if I am theirs.

My being is in danger amongst them.

Sometimes they appear as mules being shoved blindly forward.

They can feel the barbed wire cutting into their sides as they lust for carrot dangled before them from at the end of a poisonous dipped wire.

They see animals gnashing their teeth in the woods,

I see their putrid hatred pouring out of their mouths like foul breath and black oil exhaust of sick souls that can’t be bothered to wonder how I found myself so far away from them.

So comfortably outside of their reach.

Making friends with the monsters.

Finding protection with the beasts.

Laying myself down in footsteps of clover hoping thunder and lightning come to deafen their screams that I’m insane,

I’m wretched,

I’m diseased.

I wonder if they’ll whither away down the path because, from here, they appear to be shrinking, only to engorge in spirit as they attempt to beat down or swallow the unknown.

Or impose their wills upon the vulnerable.

Or turn their hind ends in the air, cowering, after they’ve pissed the proverbial rug.

They’ve tried to put a leash on wonder and make sense of miracles

To tell me with puffed chests that they know God and I don’t

They know the universe and I don’t

They know humanity and I don’t

They know the way, and I’m lost even though they’ve never known home as anything but a house,

and a door,

and a dome.

If the grass around me becomes too crisp, I’m free to explore the space I occupy in all directions,

Never just forward

Never only back

And to find myself on their path has always meant that I’ve failed somehow

But

they profess my otherness like an illness whilst looking at me with sick eyes that make pity well up in my gut.

They all know something.

And they’re terrified of it.

They crawl hurriedly over each other for a treat or a prize from some bully who proclaims his own worth must mean more than theirs because he is loud

He is imposing.

They beat each other for slights and hide from manufactured fears.

At least the fear out here is real.

Meaningful.

Important.

At least out here there is a quiet that lasts long enough for me to hear the echo of footsteps.

To see the wonder.

To live a life that means something new in a place that idolizes the failed cycles of man’s supposed worthiness.

And move on to the place in which I give no mind to their feelings as they’ve given no credence to mine,

even though,

as they’ve claimed,

I seem to have more unmanageably more.