My soft-shod feet
fall quietly
along the pavement,
then the gravel, then the curb I balance on

A metal door rolls open to admit
a young athletic cyclist
into a dark spire of glass and steel
that makes its statement
between the water and the freeway
shadowing the scruffy grasses
where homeless people pitch their tents

I walk along the edges of the city,
don’t see many people, though the land
is all but absent underneath the influence

I walk along the edges of the system, too —
not caught up in the hum of jobs and money,
not forced to be here, not incarcerated,
not forced either, to buy in
to all the ways that I could be constricted

I feel a watchfulness around my eyes
but not much commentary. A phrase
flits through my thought:
“so many different flavors of slavery”
but I don’t pursue it

There’s a way I walk through here
where I see something else —
the power inherent in each set of eyes
to melt away all kinds of walls
through the simple and singular truth
of I Am.

©Wendy Mulhern
April 21, 2015