It is this Skin

It is this skin that doesn’t fit,
in fact, I can’t remember a time that it did.

it hung like a borrowed trenchcoat
the wrong colour in a summer storm
as I walked back to the beginning,
somehow, a single wordless thought
still clear on the other side of the rain,

or it was stretched too taut as we stood, tiptoe,
reaching far for a waning moon,
as if one more breath, one more poem
would rip it from the inside,
incoherent dreams spilling through the perforations,

or now, like an unstable bag on the checkout
counter, a little bit of everything inside it,
the necessary, the unfinished, the extravagant,
thing that I will never use, things I will regret,
things I pay for not understanding how

they add up in the end,
things I plan to come back for later, but never will,
things I simply forgot, things that never belonged,
it is this skin that doesn’t fit,
in fact, I can’t remember a time that it really did.