All night I bathed myself in the rolling sounds of ambient music, an infinite loop, bobbing up and down

And woke to the sound of one of the kids calling to Alexa, to turn theirs off

And downstairs to the small lights in the corner

and the coming day

And why we need to wash ourselves in distraction, to soothe our minds from all this

And how long until the sound of morning birds instead

Now it is the clatter of plastic lights against the windows, storms coming down through the foothills, heavy snow across the passes

And why is it, on the deck ferrying down from the islands looking out to the mountains, why is it they call to me still, and I picture myself so at home there, untethered from all this

Take me home and tuck me in, take away the artifice, the facial ID: let me wake to natural light and sleep to the sounds of the earth beneath my head, the occasional hoot, the cry from a creature I can only imagine, lost and lonesome as me.

Categories: identity, poetry, prose, technology, writing

Tags: existentialism, identity, Memoir, mid-life crisis, pacific northwest, poetry, prose, William Pearse writer