C.H.B

It is known that timelines are a curious thing

One minor change, what change will it bring?

Like a morsel of algae ripped off of its root

Falling rapidly through cascading waterfalls

One hesitant switch and now all of our fruit,

All our green vegetables lining market stalls

Are changed and blue and no longer green

Mind I’ve been paired with

I find circumstances of blissful unendingness holding onto nothing

But the sound of screaming cells

The pulling tides stretch my joints till they blister and bloom

Frothy, bubbled, pursed lips and prayers begged

What does one do to conduct their total amalgamation

When they crave the inner flesh of the orange?

How I long to bury my spinal cord in a coiling spiral

So that I might emerge a centipede soul

Legged and loathed with a mouth full of rotting things

A place I seek so distant in time and spirit

Longs for me

A truth welded into the tapestry of all my ushered breaths

Oh it calls me through song and sunsets and moonrises

Blessed place, impart onto me the necessary manufacturing

Certainly

There is a fraction of my monolithic ego

That crumbles fast

From jovial jealousy

I dissolve in other people’s embrace

When I witness the compassion

People place in other people

They transmit love like radiation

Particles moving through the air

I am in absolute wonderment

And pained, sorrowful that I must see

What I cannot foresee for me

The golden prayer of heritage and community

The celebrated loving, a holy thing

I’m swept away from my darkest corners

But they now gather, darker

And I must return there, eventually

Sooner by the second

The sun sets and darkness envelops

And my once jovial jealousy now just

Hollowed misery

Haunted by some shadow of a desire

A substance-less subversion by certain

I am home to a hope bold and beautiful

To hold of a hand exquisite and dazzling

To drape upon my scarred skin

Threads of silver and silk

I am home to a dream transcendental

To find self embrace and embellish

These barren lands with flowers and wind

To see prosperity with clarity within me

I am home to a heart that beats without remorse

Once a vibrant centre to my psychological ecology

Now pickled meat, cured of connectivity

I am out of touch with this reality

Cognition of my cognitive inabilities

I am a storm of apprehension

I see so many different paths

These decisions, I hold, I am without a trace

Of inspiration

These reins have become my shackles

Into a murky darkness I have ventured

I long for a seer to see my soul away from here

I long for a warm invitation to a campfire of hope

Because hopelessness is a medicine that cures it all

We are hardly whole, growing older and wiser

Exposure to time makes the heart

An overused muscle

Fragmented

And unkind and yet

The missing pieces are in communication

With each other

I find a comfort in their interconnection

How they form a path

All this comes from a fabled power

Of a future foreseen and forthcoming

My missing pieces connect me

To a promise made by a child

To you and me, in our grim adulthood

That one day, the clouds will grow heavy

And wrung themselves to cleansing rain

And on the other side

We will glimmer and shine

A sunset in our soul gives rise

To a starry sky, of dreams fulfilled

And a warm summer night contentment

Fresh lemonade in glasses

Unfragmented

I have an absorbent substance

That lines my recognition of words and sentences

I speak my psychological phraseology with careful

Articulation

Plucked, verbal care and precision

I understand the messages and the messenger

I invite them home

They settle for a book and read it’s pages and stories

They leave me with so much

Fascination

It gathers like migrating birds to a mating place

But sometimes the whispers come in voices

A message come on a Trojan vessel

An impetus from kindness with a tongue of toxin

They land upon my comprehension

And my mind body erupts in

Inflammation

And my ability to recognise and empathise

Are compromised

I am left in absolute absorption

To contain a spilling of mess and poison

In the end, I am left alone

Left to reconfigure my senses

Now duller in shine

Cold winter winds

Claw and bite their way into verdant lands

A branding of ice and desolation

Lungs wither in presence of dark midnight

The moon afraid, she cannot see

For the clouds are foul and thick with rime

The smog beneath masks the prowling feet

Of hands and knives

Ripe with evil opportunity

The curse is upon us and ever lasting

The people huddle and hold steadfast

Around dim candles, burning fast

One finds it hard to distinguish

The lengthening shadow from the monsters outside

I sense the icy wind, like blades through cracks

Oh! How afraid we are!

Wet lambs birthed in the cold hinterlands

The morning to which we call

The sun for whom we yearn

Eternally distant, eternally far

I’ve been a little summer cloud

Alone in an expanse of sapphire blue

So high above, so out of reach

So out of touch with my own reality

I’ve seen the landscape, it’s curves and shape

But I never remembered to see the details

Those aren’t brush strokes, they’re trees

Emerald green and lush and beautiful

I was so hypnotised by the distant horizon

The gentle vibrations of the continents

They make my heart tremble

Compact ice now fragile glaciers

And rivers run

My valleys spring to life

Nourishment I’ve kept away

Nourishment I feared to consume

I’ve always feared the pain of excess

I’ve purchased pain in perpetuity

A pint of pale metal fed each day

Bitter, the taste blisters and bites

It’s force fed in pale plastic, punishment

I see it move, malevolent, material

Crawling in tubes that twist and defile

Hypnotic geometry made brain pliers

To attack the architecture of my mind

They find then finish and what’s left?

Debris, dirt and deep destination

I am told that every agony I can produce

Is precious

You came to me

Death on legs, two

You came to me

Summer sky blue

Innocent as can be

I didn’t notice how you

Said you could be

Something I once knew

You came to me in the pouring rain

Held my cold wet hands and kissed them

Yet you ran when you felt my pain

Never turned, never said you missed them

Now once again, I was alone

Unable to find my way in darkness

Because before, I was alone

I contemplate a little largely

Little details become clear

The further away you look

Sometimes all I can see

Sometimes all I can hear

Are the parts I played

Probably so poorly

Probably the worst

It’s a frozen shard

Stuck inside

My body has grown around it

It’s call covered up by flesh and bone and lies

But every odd day or so

I’ll misstep

And the fracturing pain

Splinters through my body

And I’m incapable of motion

Utter embarrassment and shame

The shame and shame and shame

Lamenting every chance I never got

Lamenting every chance I ever got

Lamenting for the person I’m not

Lamenting for the person I’m trying to be

I crave release

I crave collapse

Deflated dreams float in my pity parties

I throw the best parties

All alone

Locked in my head

Locked in a pathetic rhythm I call a life

I was born able

I was born talented

And I spent all of it in the intricacy

Of a paper house

Why was I so surprised

When the hurricane and rain

Eventually came in great force

The typhoon is terrible