I'll prolly try this assignment again, but this just happened, so...

I am a Voyeur of Ecology

A window is a mercenary tool, turning the eyes into mute cartographers: proprietors of paranoia and envy. Sunlight comes fractured; motes dance and celebrate consistent interiors. I become aware of the cold only as my breath reveals fingerprints in the glass. There are traces and imperfections: a constellation fading as the soft focus shifts to track the gleam of a Cadillac burnt by the sun as it passes on the street. Motion distorts the picture of a withered elm on the perimeter…to the locust, tethered and hollow…to my footprints beyond. I follow the prints around the corner toward a strata of reflections, one my own, cut to fit the landscape framed in the sill. The light reaching my eye is filtered through a thousand carbon ghosts: the dust of soil, osmosis in the yard, the dancing motes inside, bones…

My breath reveals scrawled epithets; the graffiti: a validation. The elm petrifies at an imperceptible rate. I chart the dissolution. I think about the wind as a sentient thing scraping away the façade of sediment to uncover historical truths. Ideas hang in the air, learning to dance. They become validations through my breath, then a blueprint for understanding. I long to tread the paths I trace there, paths tread by children. The land outside the glass is just a dream of the eye. I follow the dream around the corner, past the elm, through a gap in the fence where the sidewalk yields brief pedestrian moments of communion. I stand within the outpost of vision, the frontier. I abdicate the privacy in my kingdom for the promise of decay; illusory vegetative magic. I am surprised to find you there, showing me the way: a destination. We lay in the fields without spurs and dare the earth to throw us off…

Then I hear the wind. I can feel the cold as it clutches at my breath. The tribal eye turns on itself. I circumscribe understanding in cloned traces. The reflection, the blueprint…the safety at the window beckons me home. The furnace exhales a defiantly comfortable prayer. I am again framed by the angular, cloaked by the mirror, watching my breath exhume imperfect maps, bathed in spectral light, surrounded by a thousand dancing motes. These motes catch vents of their own, and share with me the joy in warmth and the consistency of interiors.