At last the smell that was really me came to bare, to fully express itself, as a piece of rotten fruit or uneaten meat, table scraps left to bloom in some dark, neglected space. A smell, an essence, of toxins combined with bad habits and bad hygiene. The smoker, the homeless, the mentally ill, the town idiot spiraling out of orbit, fallen to their own crater on some distant moon — and what a feeling of peace in the uncaring, shifting in the underbrush of the early morning licking a sore, hungry, still alive for another day. No dry cleaners or office parking lots here. At last, the real me. Hiding in the shadows with that stilted, startled look of the coyote, untamed. The self is not all it’s cracked up to be, it smells of the earth and ground. It needs to get out and forage. It does best undercover.

Categories: prose, writing

Tags: #amwriting, identity, nature poetry, poem, poetry, prose, William Pearse writer