this morning as i watched the sunrise:

i asked the chattering birds, the swifting clouds, the paling sky, the shadows, the damp air, the dying night "please come with me to bed, let us pause and dream for a while. there is no need to rush into today when we have already had so many days and have so many more days ahead..."

i wanted to reach out and grab everything and hold it and have it. but i soon realized, or more so remembered, there was not a bit of reality in my desires. today had already begun and parts of it were already gone, perhaps lost forever.

this week has sent my head spinning. i can't help but be reminded of life's ability to not only progress and digress down certain pathways very quickly, but also its tendency to hop onto other paths that we have never known before, often leaving us lost and frightened. there is a fragility in everything we are and do that we all tend to ignore, which always flashes before us in the most unexpected moments.

not everything always "works out" and hardly anything we expect to happen ever happens. never are the most horrible things that happen to us fair or anticipated, but we can endure so much more than we can imagine. we can watch a sunrise and a nightfade and remember the most amazing things. we can keep these things with us forever if we want to. we can not ask for the birds to pause in mid-flight, or ask a person to stay in our lives who is leaving or already gone. we can not pause a day or pretend the world stops while we dream. life is always moving, changing, fleeting, revolving. we can move with it and we can be a part of it. as long as we are living we can always smile, breath deep the air, taste the water, and fill our hearts with love.

as my own life advances and changes i can not help but see all of your lives moving so freely beside mine. you amaze me and give me the courage to smile and feel secure in my role as a living breathing loving thing.

i am absolutely sure that all of you know all of this, i just feel they are things that can always use some reiteration.





xo

what a little blood can do

bled to the point that your veins feel thin, they ache, they churn, they still seep
there has been a loss or a gain, you are not sure which
should you laugh madly or scream silently?
until you pass out
but you can't do either, any
no dear nothing, you are dry
you are too aware, too close to
and too many things too far from
there is a nothing that devours what is left of you
there is a nothing that still seeps scentless from you
you would be better off dead but this you are not
you would be better off without and so you are
you are dry, but you are, you are, you are, you are
see/say it again so this time you will believe it
then forget it again so this time you won't see it

my mouth has gone

the dark wound where sap dripped so constantly from has not healed at all. rather, there has been a sever at mid-trunk; only my uprooted legs and feet are left to wonder loosely through humid midnight. i am drawing letters in the dirt with my toes, but these are letters who won't associate with the frivolity of bright and astonishing words. these letters are bleak and without passion. they are vulgar in their simplicity. they are meant only for the other nocturnal beasts who roam separately, bound only to amnestic oblivion and to their own dim shadows. they are for the indifferent and illiterate. if you were to stumble upon this wood, and if you were to hesitate upon one of my letters scribbled in the dirt, you would not recognize it as mine. it would spell out nothing. you wouldn't care for it, it wouldn't care for you.

there isn't a word left to write to you, but here i am: still rambling. here i am atop this abandoned mound of words and punctuations, i am the ruler of beginnings and middles and ends which are as tangled/confused/useless as they were when they were living. there you are, the incessant empty space between every piece tangible. the dark matter not at hand. you touch nothing but surround it all. you are no longer among the stars, you are the clouds that blot them.

linseed oil

it is always a scent, the more heavy and lingering, the deeper the memory ruptured.

i lay on my back, collapsed over the side of my bed with my head almost touching the floor. i let the blood rush in until i can hear nothing but my spinning heart. i stare vaguely at the shadows cast on my wall and press my palms flat to the cold oak floor. that goddamn old shadow box comes into focus like a stranger passing on a dark road. i close my eyes and fill my dead lungs with dank and humid air. the tears follow one another over my forehead and into my loose hair.

the news of the dead. always the same astonishment. the same sinking regret. the same question "why?" laying unanswered between the bodies.

my heart is still spinning. can you feel this?

his heavy dark brows clutch his eye sockets. his smile is rabid. i wish to taste his fever, i want it to rise in my upside down skull and boil the rot out of my belly. i want to vomit and chop what is left of your mania into a dust fine enough to be absorbed again through the skin and lungs.

i sit up fast. now i am all spinning.

i have turned into a something less that a wisher; a prayer. i pray for what is rotting and putrid. i have become a monk devoted to ego, asking for its judgement, begging for its rapture. i have alarmed myself to sin and embraced it with a choke hold. i have sought liberation and found myself tying myself naked to a stop sign, save the splintering rope tied about my waist. i have been there, here, for months, years. my body is crawling away from itself. my muscles have slipped from my tyrant bones, and my bones have managed to escape as well. my teeth have chewed through my mouth, and my tongue laps and twists, screaming violently like a trapped sea monster through the gaping holes left. i possess not a cell of what i was. i am drooling like a mad dog, frothing, gurgling, spitting profanities, praying to be beaten and choked, to be pushed in front of death to see alive.

everything is still, lucid. my life is calm and is as simple as the tides.

can you feel this?