Accuracy by Inches - A Hyperion Poem

No beginning just a seam in the water Pressure folding through me long before I spoke Motion carried in the wrist like an inherited order A current choosing pathways my choices only cloak I called it thinking This drag in the bone this pre owned oar Each stroke feels like decision But the river wrote it before Maps collapse at the edges they were drafted to ignore So I named it progress just to quiet the bind at the core They said be yourself Then sold me shapes I had to fit Freedom on the label with a mold beneath the script I wore a mans certainty eleven winters deep Stitched his cadence to my throat Till my sentences would sleep Heard it bark out of my mouth Wrong echo wrong keep Stopped mid claim like a witness catching perjury mid speech Not awakening Just another room with better light Same frame Same angles just a kinder way to write I leave and re enter New keys same night Call it self while it edits what survives the sight I revised like a nation Flags folded over fact Ceremony in the margins While the borders stay intact Public regret polished Private policy cracked Clean hands on the podium Same lines on the map Strip it back Said one No one left to strip Said another Choose anyway Said a third Barrel laughter from the gutter All precise at noon none Hold when the structures shudder Two a m and the blueprint reads Like it belonged to my mother Every doctrine builds a room that warms Until it binds Shelter with a silhouette that narrows What you find You fit or youre outside so I stepped back to the blind Into water without witness Cold grammar of the mind They promise you a home Then charge you for the air Belonging as a contract you renew Through self repair I knelt at what I thought was source clean water honest ground Found my face still wearing everything I swore Id drowned Mirror didnt notice I had tried to cut it down Like effort doesnt echo If the current owns the sound Then someone watched the contour Not the polish not the pitch Caught the slip mid sentence The seam beneath the stitch Didnt close the distance Didnt crown it as a fix Just returned the next day With a map that moved a bit Not union No one carries rivers in their chest No one names the unnamed tributaries into rest Just a mind updating models honest under stress Accuracy by inches care Measured not professed They sell you being known Like a cure that makes you whole Truth is partial contact that refuses full control I chased a place Called origin a sterile kind of start Where edits end and ownership returns me to my part But I was speaking mid sentence Before I learned the art Already in a story With a strangers beating heart Tuesday wears the terror Now routine in the bone Wisdom or exhaustion I stopped needing to be shown Just the fact I keep composing From materials not my own And something stays beside me While I navigate alone I forgot what I was hunting Clean water honest ground Spent years sanding language Till no splinter could be found But claritys a costume That the current drags around And certainty is silence Dressed as something profound Now someone at the shoreline Reads the way I steer Not testing not correcting Just refining what is here Taking answers as provisional Adjusting year by year Closing gap by fractions While the river doesnt clear They noticed I was tired before the sentence made it out Stayed without a thesis Didnt litigate the doubt No promise of arrival No doctrine to route Just attention that persists When the self is in dispute They ask you for a destination Proof you finally won But all you ever hold are better maps of what youve done No beginning No clean end just edits in the flow I move with what Im given With what Ill never know Distance narrowing by effort Not a place you get to go And after rivers like this That progress is enough to row Accuracy is earned in inches Certainty is bought in lies ~by Unreadhyperion