Legs tangled
Minds a million miles apart
I ask if we could get lost together
She says I was gone long ago
Where did I go, I ask
You went looking for yourself
Did you ever find yourself?
She teased
No…only shadows
That weren’t even mine
Legs tangled
Minds a million miles apart
I ask if we could get lost together
She says I was gone long ago
Where did I go, I ask
You went looking for yourself
Did you ever find yourself?
She teased
No…only shadows
That weren’t even mine
2 hours a night; 14 a week; 60 hours a month
That’s 30 days a year we spend dreaming
I balanced stones in haphazard towers
On shores I knew I’d never see again
Over the average lifetime we’ve lived two lives
68 years bound by physics and 6 years a god
I’ve shown acts of kindness to strangers
Never knowing how deep into well the light digs
I’ve grown old and cast aside wonderment
Thinking a 401K is the single answer to all
I cast poems out into a world built of 1s and 0s
These mirrors in pitch black rooms reflect me
I’ve passed a baton to the next sorry soul
Pleading go farther and straighter than me
I’ve manned a lighthouse at the edge of reason
Guiding myself away from the siren’s call
Is lunacy the legacy?
We are all artists painting windows on cell walls
I’ve been a stone hoping for flat smoothness
That someone might skip me across dark lakes
I walk faster on this hamster wheel for a raise
So I can afford grease for ancient gears
I’ve danced to long forgotten songs
Wailing melodies buried marrow deep
Logos are your house’s sigil
A circle of protection made of blood-swishes
I dreamt of a family who welcomed me as kin
I understood home in the shine of their eyes
My brain is a blending stump
Softening the edge of mindless conscription
I think I need redemption
For some forgotten grievance
I think I need an apology
For a grievance I wish I could forget
I think that I think too much
And for that I owe myself an apology
The sun has set…a faint glow is what remains
I stand at a crossroads not knowing
Am I subject to physics, or am I a god…?
She’s the antidote
When the world’s getting to me
When the pressure has built
When I’m clawing at this birdcage chest
I tuck her love under tongue
So it’s hidden from the unclean world
So it dissolves slowly
Straight to the bloodstream
Unfiltered by the liver
Straight through the blood-brain-barrier
High as fuck I walk through my days
Hoping no one can tell
Knowing everyone can
This panacea is marrow deep now
Same place knowledge hides
That kind passed down over generations
Beneath ALL the bullshit
Predating language
Under the tongue
She was, to me, a fresh pair of glasses
The sun readying to retire
Contrast of shadow and light
Eyes adjusting to a stronger prescription
Until now it was as if the world was flat
A projection on a yellowed screen
The blurring of edges
As if my depression had lulled my eyes
But now—now!
The world has sprung anew
Her love…these glasses…have me redefined
Where once a tree was a cloud of green
Now it’s 200,000 dancing leaves
Trunk bark a thumbprint
An oak across a field seems at arm’s length
Even for this nearsighted introvert
Everything seems within reach…even love
When the sun’s finally set
And dreams dance behind my eyes
My new glasses remain perched on nose
So even in my dreams I find clarity
There she sits beneath a tree with me
Backs against a familiar thumbprint
200,000 hands waving from above
Applauding
When you close your eyes
Do I disappear?
When I exit stage left
Is my part played out?
The weariness of awareness
The algorithm of I’ll go with him
Am I just an angsty teenager
Carving FTW in my desk?
Am I a Myers Briggs for misfits
A Rorschach for depressives?
I think that I am just an ant
Self-sacrificed to bridge a gap
Those ephemeral spaces
Between obligations
When Pavlovian notification tones pause
And subsequent serotonin dumps seize
My words might remind you
Like a Jerry Springer rerun
That things could always be worse
This wonderful contrast
Makes your avocado toast pic likes
All the better thanks to my bitter
Like craving sweet after salty
But I’m just a palate cleanse away
From oblivion
Or is it a colon cleanse?
So push the handle down
Watch me spin round
The afterthought is just a trickle
Until the tank is full
Now go wash your hands
And it’ll be like I never existed at all
But for the briefest of moment
Words held charge
And action potential was achieved
You spend half your life with your hands covering your mouth, muffling your screams, regretting the things you’d said
You spend the the other half kneading your knuckles into doughy temples wishing you had said the things you didn’t
We define ourselves in these moments of action or inaction and let those moments of blissful silence pass by unnoticed
We are hurricanes turned inside out, where the storm rages most on the inside and the calm is all around us within reach
Still pushed by high pressure and drawn to low, hoping the decisions we make steer the ship, but they’re ripples in slack sails
What you think is instinct is just the past echoing into the now, the eyes of a bully from school making distrust of a stranger
She spoke an uncommon and long forgotten phrase that the girl who broke your heart once used and flight wins over fight
Your favorite movie is a mystery that you can’t solve, as to why it haunts you, and it’s simply because it makes you feel at home
Your need to make sense of it all, the storm within, instead of just letting the peace inside, is your undoing
Your actions define you less in how you faced the storm and more in how you made every attempt to be the calm
This tug of war has no happy ending, as the very idea of reconciling the out with the in is a fallacy
The mighty ship you think you’re at the helm of is just a leaf set afloat by a summer rainstorm
The best you can hope for from your decisions, those ripples, that they are guided by love
That the inquisitive eyes of a newborn will see beauty in the way your leaf danced just before being sucked into a drain
Hopefully, this creates an indiscernible echo, a future instinct, where they choose love, as well
This dance isn’t self-sacrifice, it’s mutually assured destruction…between the world as you see it and the one you wish to make, but the dance is still beautiful
Of course the world continues on after the leaf enters the storm drain, but it’s changed, and the world as uniquely seen from your perspective, that world…dies with you
I mourn those losses by bringing in the calm and by dancing in the rain
Driftwood dreams washed up on foreign shores.
Sun bleached white.
Dismembered ghost limbs bobbing at oblivious heavens.
Would a corked bottle have been kinder?
Tossed is tossed though hope remains.
Acknowledge that part of me.
Jetsam.
That piece I thought you cared for, and in the caring kept it alive.
Atrophied petals drifting away in the slightest breeze.
Not dandelion seeds that dream of fertile purchase, but something destined to decay.
A mere reminder of what was once beautiful.
The red bled away and left a translucent skin…a thumbprint.
But beachcombers sift for shells and I am here in the land you left behind—hollowed.
The pieces that remain, that were always only mine, bring me no joy.
I look at the voids my decay has left and I long to be whole, or to be wholly gone.
I am left with nothing but phantom itching and sun bleached, driftwood dreams, that dance at the periphery.
If you do happen across these pieces of me, these driftwood castaways, fashion them with sinew into an effigy and burn me into ash.
Then I can ascend and serve as a beacon…a cautionary tale.
Gifts are often more than we can bear
These connections
These sharings
These overlaps
This anchor hangs about my neck
We are now bound
And I am bound to regret it
Your honeyed breath
Your words of buoyancy
Where do I go with this
What do I owe to this
You give me a book
Now I must read, discuss and play fan
You give me a plant
Now I nurture/sustain and hide its decay
You encumber me and I feign gratitude
Gifted a hundred pictures of butterflies
And I just want to remain a caterpillar
Or if I do choose to metamorphose
I want it to be of my own volition
I want to owe no one—nothing
So when you fashion me wings
Of feathers and wax
I don’t fly high out of jubilation
I do it to gain control
I own my free fall
And I will build myself anew
From the ground up
There’s a chill in my bones
That this springtime sun
Cannot reach
It’s a slowing of atoms
Approaching absolute zero
Of being 48 years old
Or whatever that means
The grass doesn’t shine
Like that from my youth
A fine layer of sediment
Has covered everything
Including myself
Something for the moss
To anchor to
Gravity is winning
As it always does
Will I rise from these ashes
Born anew
Or simply fertilize the thoughts
Of the next shift
The changing of guards
Over the hill sounds nice
Like the hard parts over
The struggle has ended
And momentum now carries me
But I must still take care
Each gravity assisted step
Could send me cartwheeling
When…how will I know that I’m enough
You’ve seen them after the accident
Flowers, stuffed animals, solar lights
A memorial for someone taken too soon
The glitter of glass on black asphalt
As above, so below
At first these tragic displays overflow
Friends, family, coworkers
Leave crosses, notes, stuffed animals
As time passes it diminishes
Until only a dutiful loved one
Stands roadside with fresh flowers
And a new set of solar lights
The hum of the passing traffic
Raising the hairs on their necks
The precarious nature of life
The uncertainty of a vigil
So close to the very hurtling weapons
That caused the death
Creating the emptiness
Now filled with trips to Home Depot
And Hobby Lobby
Do we leave a bit of ourselves in passing
Like haunted houses
Grandma is gone
But the smell of her cooking
The lilt of her songs
The rocking of her chair
Move in and out
Like exclamation points
On moments of longing
Does this happen roadside
To those left behind
When grass sticks to shoes
When tears mix with rain
When the lights flicker on
At dusk
Headlights illuminating this tableau
Do they wonder who will carry on
When they pass
Or if someone will do the same for them
We all grieve in our own ways
I know this
I want to buy a bench and placard
At the nature trails my dad walked
Celebrate his love of wildlife
I even spread his ashes there
Maybe making the flora greener
Which is the best we can hope for
A positive change from our leaving
Every time I pass a roadside memorial
I feel myself standing there
The longing
Cursing, perhaps, the carelessness
Of the driver of the WMD
I feel the loneliness in my bones
Someday I’ll stop at a florist
Leave a bouquet
How happy that would make them
Those passed and those carrying on
When I go I hope it’s at home
Surrounded by friends and family
If it’s my weary and clogged heart
That gives out
Go ahead and lay flowers and lights
In front of the local fast food restaurants
Leave a stuffed animal
In my dent in the couch