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# I have the ground
- URL: https://www.qntns.com/i-have-the-ground/
- Published: 2025-10-02T00:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-08-31T16:43:57.000Z
- Description: You wreck yourself on poison things, lick led, or so they say. The brain it rots it splits itself, withstanding only pain.
- Author: Quentin Staley
- Tags: #fixed-lines, Poems

I have the ground

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You wreck yourself on poison things,  
lick led, or so they say. The brain  
it rots it splits itself, withstanding  
only pain.

The people there make sympathies,  
but deft you are no more. The hate  
you have now for yourself  
has brought you to abhor.

You lose your mind, your skill, your will.  
You think yourself so poor. You wonder  
if you’ve lost it all, but no, you have the floor.

Pushing up upon yourself  
is earth with all her might.  
Yet you curse, she’s damning thee,  
that gravity doth fight.

You sag, you age, you lose your sound,  
you’re hardly worth your bones.  
Your friends are dead and passed you on,  
no good of you is known. You wonder  
how you even breathe, you struggle just to stand.  
You don’t, you fall, you’ve lost it all.  
Just days till you disband.

But always then and always now  
you won’t have lost your ease,  
for even when you’re lost not found  
and crying on your knees, you  
cannot lose the mat of life,  
the home to all your seeds.

“At last,” you say,  
“I have the ground.  
I sit, I stand, I till the earth.  
The ground is all I need.”