Here And There

He was a temporary and permanent address, the epitaph said.
Wonder what it meant.
Maybe he belonged to both,
perhaps to none,
perhaps his shoes had sands from different places
and the tastebuds on his tongue
drew a world map.
Maybe he carried his home in a backpack
like it was a box of Lego blocks
and he had built and taken down his home so often
that years ago,
he threw away the instruction manual.
Maybe he had tattoos from across the world on his arms,
markers of latitudes and longitudes,
maybe he could speak in a dozen languages
and never quite got fluent enough at any
to blend in, unnoticed.
Maybe he was not just the only one,
maybe he lived in several universes
and slipped from one to another,
forward or backward,
like a molecule
across states of matter.

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