The brain keeps a map
of the body. Your left thumb
on the same street
as mine. Homunculus

neighbors, though we’ve
never met. The senses,
our first citizenship—
the common country

of light, vibration,
balance, heat. Even
the blind man’s visual cortex,
that empty ballroom,

keeps the lights on,
keeps waiting. We all live
in the theater
of I, stitching

a self from whatever
threads we’re handed.
The amnesiac forgets
every morning

but still knows
how to knot
a story. The one
with the photographic mind

works the same loom,
just different rhythms—
fast enough
to blur, or slow enough

to count each knot.
Go back far enough
and we’re ferns.
The brainstem

remembers when
we were salamanders,
when want was simple
as the slip-pull

of a body through water,
simple as moisture.
The limbic system,
that old landlord,

collects rent
in the same currency:
fear, desire,
the sugar of being held.

We’re never lost,
not really—
every human
a flickering lamp

in the same woods,
following the same neural
trails our ancestors
burned. The calcium

in your bones
was cooked in a star
that died before
this planet had a name.

Common as that.
The self is a story
the body tells
in the dark, hoping

someone’s listening.
The chorus
in the solo. The map
where others see

only the lost.