O Universe Whoe lives
within and beyond
and through us,

As the soft-furred bunny asked,

How do you get to be Real?

I am so often anything but.

I may be just a collection of narratives,
told by others long ago and now,
spoken and unspoken.
They have been stuffed into my own mouth
like a chloroform rag, making me panicked and sleepy.

Will you, Real, help pull the rag,
help me breathe?

The stories are told around and around,
a spiral somehow further and further
from the center
where Your drum beats in me.
Accretions of years of stories
Fat gluttony
Woman weak and tearful
Lost potential, ugh, that oily, poisoned word sticks and pokes with its slime.
And of course
failure
A carapace of hardened tales
told sometime out of some kind of love
concern(-trolling),
and sometimes simply mocking, belittling, wounded bear-baiting.

Can I wriggle out,
a cicada
singing Your Song,
the Song of the One
Who is Real?