not-forest

that night i said let's go into the bar-code
& you followed me because each day i was composed 
of mostly water. you called me ocean, river, creek,
stream, girl & i held up purchased items
to offer us a place to escape to. you had 
a skull made of glass. i had hooves to knock
on the wooden floor with. you had a fear of
forests & i had a fear of the flood happening again.
i told you i was listening to an audio book version
of the bible & the sound of god came echoing.
if we have children what will we tell them
to explain our bodies? no, no we'll say nothing.
& i was scared of bar-code but it pretended 
to feel safer there for you. we stepped between
the tall blank strips of black. varying lengths 
& sizes. nothing can survive too long in a bar-code
because there's no food or air. we held our breaths.
we clenched our fists. you wasted air
to speak, saying i feel at home here. between
the thinnest stripes we too became slivers
of life. i griped a tall black beam & looked up
wishing it were a sapling & that above i might find
a nest or a rustling. no rustling. you loved
the bareness-- the crisp truth of two colors.
the faint hum that suggested scanning & the knowledge
that we were traversing a space where no one else
would ever find us. i wonder still if this is
what went wrong with us. if maybe we sought out
the corners void of air. you strummed a black bar.
you pressed your hands to the white background.
you told me to take out your tongue & leave it here
among the not-forest but i refused. i was 
running out of air. i was thinking of
windows & how i could use one for a face
if all else failed. all else will 
almost always fail. tell me, though how do you
ask someone to stay while you go? how do you
learn to just see a bar-code & not think 
that it might be a way out. in the bar-code
we had the wonderful bodies of eight-year-olds.
we had fingers made of soft clay. we heard
the sound of eating-- everything eating.
eating clothes eating glass eating bones.
my hooves on a different planet. your glass 
mechanisms left up to god. before i go 
i tell you that the bar-code will,
like all worlds, eventually come undone.
you said you wanted to come undone with it--
you wanted to feel that distress. you wanted
to experience gray on a molecular level
& yes i left you & i walked right outside
& i didn't stop walking until i found a sapling
to climb up into in case of the floor.