Confession (Version 2)

The sky is bright.
So intensely bright
it hurts my eyes to watch.
The world isn’t supposed
to be this bright, sterile white.
Even these people
are dressed in white,
incessantly chattering.
They don’t know.

I can’t hear them.
I’m not really here,
none of this is real.
My last moment of reality
was over five years ago.
That is the only thing
that can redeem this moment
in time. Because the world
isn’t supposed to trickle red.
It isn’t supposed to be silent,
grey at the edges, running
like a watercolor.

Everything is so
completely different now.
So . . .empty, silent.
I can’t even hear my heart,
and these people, still talking,
to me . . . .
They don’t matter;
what matters
is that I’m not really here,
I haven’t been for years.

I will awake,
I will be a child.
I will have red hair,
the sky will be blue.
A bright, aching blue.
I will not know the smell
of empty bathrooms,
cleaning supplies, a cooking
spoon. I will not remember
what the lights looked like
as devils coursed through my veins .

I will never have seen these people,
in their white coats
with their strange,
clicking movements.
This swelling I feel
in my chest isn’t my death.
I’m not really here,
in what I know is a hospital.

I am a newborn child.
The world is large around me,
a vast shining web of possibilities
radiating out before in every direction
from a nexus of blood and afterbirth.
I will live to be old as my parents,
and when I open my eyes and look up,
the sky will be a bright,
aching,
wonderous blue.