I found an old map of my life in the closet today,
worn almost to the point of tearing.
It was burnt at one end, my birth I suppose.
Pieces of it still crumble when I’m not careful.
The first roads are drawn in crayon and lead only in circles.
There is a picture of a man sitting at a table shaped like the moon
somewhere around my sixth birthday.
My father perhaps.  I don’t remember.  

By the age of eleven the first small houses appear,
my friend Tommy with his German Shepard shooting cap guns,  
further down, real guns, another hole. Of course
none of this is to scale.  The first graves appears at age
twelve, my grandmother is drawn wearing a black dress
made of constellations.  I stand next to her holding a toy spaceship.  
By this time the trees behind my house are quite detailed,
their leaves cut from old green food stamps.  The compass
is backward.  West is East.  South is missing.

There is a flattened rose at age fifteen.  The child I lost.
The child I never really wanted.  Its petals crumble in my hand.
Only the thorns remain.  A drop of faded blood.  
There are railroad tracks now moving into the city.
A brown ring from a coffee cup drifts toward the mountains,
my mother’s influence.  I have a small piece of her dress
cut into the shape of the town church.  It looks as if
it had been torn out and later replaced.

By the age of nineteen the city is almost full.  Each road
mapped out in great detail.  The houses have siding and brick now,  
small shutters and slanting mailboxes.  They are cold and
meaningless.  Exact.  Where I first met Emily there is a heart
covered in bees and a picture of Salvador Dali
hiding inside my right ear.  A key explains what the symbols mean.  
My mother is a humming bird.  I am the skeleton of a Great Dane.  
In the clouds there are cities made of old bones.
These are my dreams.  

Toward the end the paper begins to yellow and curl.  The last lines  
sink into the center of a gray lake.  The fish there have human faces
and sit in circles throwing knives at one another.
At the bottom of the water a sun burns blue and begins to cave.
It swallows the lake and then the city and then my childhood.  
I can feel it pulling at my hand as I drop the page and try to escape
knowing it is already too late.