Conclusions

(a poem)

God gave humans a brain each:

an awkward noodly mass you could hold

in your hands — a gray-purple slime of sorts

It has folds: surface area for connections

upon connections upon connections

Conclusions are pressed into slimy surfaces,

intuited deductions like this old one:

Birthday cake candles are waxy and bright pink.

Balloons and birthday cards and paper cups: also bright.

The world must be bright for me.

Now I have accumulated many conclusions

about the light in candles and the wax they are made of

and lots and lots and lots of things about pink

and decades of harsher deductions about me —

conclusions from overlapping memories painted

with synaptic brushes: a palimpsest of personhood

I don't know anymore

that the world is bright for me, but I know

my life is worthy of the space it takes,

and the painful etchings on my mind from

my anxious self that have insisted otherwise

have been out-logicked and outdone.