#whativeleftbehind

Sometimes the strongest battle stride is a simple swing of the white flag. These times are distinctive. I will find my heart on the ground, my arms open, and my mind upside down. I will scream, cry out, writhe in resistance; my pride is one son of a bitch to conquer. I will fall. And then it will end, dear. It will end in a dance of victory. Because rising again -- two feet strong, finally knowing their place -- is the glorious affirmation that I am worth everything you are unable to give.

I can’t write in verse. My mind is too preoccupied with mistakes I have made. Yesterday brought them to the surface, and page 204 won’t let them pass. How do these dead men know me? It seems regret is timeless and never fades; I am convicted of my wrongs and cannot see the path that may release me. Their words are a terrible echo, the simple shapes and sounds of them are hostile. ‘There is no space’ for what I long for and abandoned, no room for past decisions to escape my thoughts. ‘All pack tight’ suffocate and merge to ‘mold their surfaces against each other.’ Holmes, return to your trees. Speak of beauty and some other distant thing; do not bare my heart. Last night the man that could have been spoke with me about the violence of truth. We both are blessed and cursed with the ability to hide it. Our two tongues are agile with pardons. I have no direction, no sense of ‘right tastes, affections and habits’. But I am not convinced I want to meet those measures of the self.  I fall short, have been flailing for years. And maybe there I have named it; we fail to be the expected, neither of us appear ‘masters of action’.  Mr. Hall, you’ve misspoken. It is my blazing, his torch, and the small revolutions that make us.

The stars are worn; their beauty,            the light and flicker                     and distance of them, has been emptied.              Tabula rasa;                                   I wish we could be clean. Our gruesome entrance to this world            couldn’t have been the end of it. She told me            to spread my words            across the page,                                 take up the space, use my voice like a flood,                                              baptize. I once wrote about bringing dirt to my eyes.            what would it feel like;                          would blindness sting?                                   I can’t fathom that aloneness. We left each other to make sense of it. She was               my lover; now she wants                our last kiss,                wonders what it was. The gravity of it, I say,          was what we had lost . I remember the warmth                        of her cheek in my palm,                       guiding her into                                                 the love I had to offer;                                      she has forgotten. The night covers the shoreline, the boundaries no longer clear,         a blank horizon                    spreads before me, and what the moon gives,         light, blunt in the breeze, leaves the silhouettes,                                        my hands for her.     The stars bring nothing,                                       idle gifts,                                       drowned in the dark.

what a beautiful chaos. perhaps it's back to the start of things. or maybe it's time to revisit prose poetry -- give myself the space required to pull the pieces back together.

sometimes she'll search for a line and i wish i could giver her one of mine