I feel displaced and alien like the dirt underneath my fingernails. The soil I cut the daffodils from washes eventually down the sink with the taste of trying to forget leaving to sit somewhere in the plug. Theorem and academia sit in the pungent water propping the daffodils alive.
I do not write in the classroom anymore because under strip-lighting my bones feel so translucent I cannot think of anything other than the jolted prose on the board. Like an amoeba, I cling to the teeth of the professor, and the invisible droplets of spit floating into the atmosphere.
Shallow ecologists accept the arguments insofar as I retreat into the chair like that army of paper dolls, clutching medals and bullet-stained photographs. In here, my words would stand alone and shake so weakly they'd need the comfort of bad metaphors to hold them steady.
Anthropocentrism assumes human superiority and importance over the actions of an exhausted butterfly licks at pollen like a hammer coming down onto a nail. In my head the image repeats like a moment on a stuck video tape, wings, handle, filtered honey-hued by sunlight and scattered white noise.
Kropotkin influenced the ideology through his writing where he disappeared from paper for that season, and I found open arms at the bottom of a bottle. Supermarket brand, two litres, potent like white spirit or crude oil. I capsized after twelve weeks of unwashed hair, pushed the liquid from my lungs with an indignant cough, and picked up the scattered, water-bloated set texts. I transcended thoughts about the weather that day and embraced evenings of the study of nothingness, and bad music, watching the tendons in my feet move around like strings.