From Cafe Writing's Anniversary / September-October Project:

Option Five: Timed Writing

He is outside of everything, and alien everywhere. He is an aesthetic solitary. His beautiful, light imagination is the wing that on the autumn evening just brushes the dusky window.

- Henry James

Take nine minutes (use all nine, but don't go over), and write on the subject of being outside of everything. This is a timed exercise and it's expected that it won't be perfect. Any format - fiction, essay, verse - is acceptable.

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Being outside of everything (defined)

Being outside of everything
is like a floating body above one's own
10 seconds before death.
Is it consciousness,
and how do you define being alive--
when the heart stops
or when the brain dies?
What is existence?
Is it after when the baby comes out
of a woman's womb
or when it's still a tadpole
stuck to a cord?

Being outside of everything
is courage to be oneself,
not holding back
but speaking truth
before adversity and not feeling
guilty as you would before a judge,
the naughty vs. nice on scales.

Being outside of everything
is infinity on a coordinate plane
and finding that it does not exist
on paper or mind.
Does that mean life
cannot be defined (or definite) either?

Being outside of everything
is thinking that boundaries
are not definable and cannot be held
within a box.
Upon unleashing what's inside,
it does not become a Pandora's box,
rather it isn't a box at all,
for being outside is like water
taking shape of its container,
each molecule sticking together
on the brim of a glass,
and splitting one
is like viciously trying to neglect the soul
and feed the body.

Being outside of everything
means time is never lost
nor had it ever been present, past or future.
It's the stillness of a heart
that frees itself of selfishness
and becomes peace.

Being outside of everything
is difficult to imagine
within the constraint of human thought, word and action.
How do we get there?
Is it beauty that brushes past
one's own cheeks as one sleeps?
Does it mean to be out of one's own body
and go fill in another?
Or would that be sin to possess someone else's body?
Or does it mean to be a guardian angel,
without a body to belong to
but a spirit that is an observer
and a universal conscience?
Or is being outside of everything
is existence within God's mind,
your thoughts already His?