410 grams

 That’s what they said your heart weighs.

The Fates, withered now: so few believe in them they get caught in the shifting sands of faith and story.

Weighed your still heart: kept beating too long, I think.

I hope they found it lighter, placed on that pewter scale.

I hope that last cryptic message gave you the peace you needed and that you took a clean slate with you for them to write your eternity upon.

Lighter than a feather, your still heart: soft, and pale in some distant gloom: some anemic sunset.

I forgive you your trespasses, if that’s what you needed.

I forgive you your storms and your absence and your withdrawal from anything that felt like connection: it was all too sharp and you knew every edge of that thin blade.

I’m glad your heart is still, now.  And your soul with it.  I am glad you don’t suffer anymore: I know you wonder and let me reassure you, it’s worth the expense.  The grief is heavy, but it does get better with time.  The darkness you carried might never have.

Ghosts in the Hall.

  I walk past, my head down, my feet sure.

Can't make eye contact with them or they'll know I'm here.

Keep my head down, try not to interact.

Ghosts line the walls, they don't walk in the middle of the hallway anymore.

I don't trip over their feet these days & they barely recognize me when I do look up.

We've forgotten each others faces, but I know the smell every time.

You smell like death, my old friends.

You smell like hunger and that deep regret that only lives in grief.

All my dearest ghosts of the times I couldn't help, the nights that drained my soul.  All my hubris, my frustration, my shame and excuses.  

I have to walk past you still, all lined up there by the window.  

I know there's some good I did around the corner somewhere, but today all I can hear is the sound of incurable failure.

I smiled at my great-grandmother, there in the sacred hall.  She peeks through the withering wraiths and I wonder if she ever felt this way.  

Did they wait for you, too?  Will they ever stop waiting for me?

Fighting the tide, and spider feet.

 Tired of it.

Tired of the instability, riding out the mood swings.  

I'm tired of chasing off the demons.  I run, swinging wildly at some hell-bats winging at me in the night, swinging, swung from a broomstick.  Gotta turn the tide somehow.  Got caught in that riptide and now I'm swimming toward the shore with all my might.  I want the tide to come back in.  It sucked me so far out this time I can't see the shore and the waves just keep washing over and over and over and over.

I'm over it. 

The version of me that is happy, happy-go-lucky.  The version of me that I remember is wasting away on the shoreline like sand through my hourglass shape.  

I feel like I'm losing my grip.  Like I'm going to get lost in the ugly confusion of my visions and that's all I'll be.  It's harder and harder to follow the story.  I lose track of it.  

I remember going round and round in the circle of my own consciousness.  I remember the cycle of becoming and realizing and knowing in that instant I was dying, and sometimes I feel like I am still there, laying on my bed dying and this is the last of my consciousness living a life in my mind as the real me is breathing my last breath.  

It makes me choke, to think about it.

Then I remember that I'm thinking too much and not to do that anymore.  Have to be grounded, keep it together.  Follow the story.

Its this depressive rumination that will get me down - thinking about thinking.  I can think all I want, but it won't explain my being.  This solipsistic navel-gazing doesn't make me any more or less loved.

I remember knowing  -knowing- that the thing that would save me is how much I am loved.  That I would save others because of how much I am loved.  Strip me down to my core belief and that's what I get. 

Don't fight it - let the ocean carry you.  Swim parallel to the shore you know, keep going in the same direction and sometime soon you'll realize the water wasn't all that deep anyway.

You'll put your little feet down and find them in the soft sand.  The waves won't tumble you anymore, the visions won't be full of spiders, they'll be full of flower petals.  

Spider feet are tapping, soft and gentle.  I let them crawl right in my mouth and fall asleep.  I breathe in a whole lungful of water and breathe it back out.  Maybe I'll find I can even sing, underwater.  

I welcome the dark.  I am curious, and gentle with myself.  I will not fight the tide, today.  

Up. Right.

Minutes. 

Hours, maybe.

I get to choose how long I remain upright in the world.

I get to choose where I spend my spoons, today.

Walk a block, or stand and deliver.

Lift my silly little nephew out of his seat, or sit in the theatre: not both.

I get to choose, now.  I get to pace myself and measure my steps.

Measuring life from one painkiller to another.  

I used to mark my life from one show to the next. 

Now it's from one pill to the next, one treatment to the next.

I know it happens to everyone.  I'm grateful it isn't something more terrifying yet.

I guess I thought I would have had a little more time upright.

I get to choose now, whether to grieve all the things I don't get to do anymore, 

Or celebrate the things I did and cherish every single moment that I get now.

I love how slow my world has become.  I get to live with so much more intention now.

I can't blindly say 'yes' to everything anymore now, so given the choice:

I'll measure my life in love. 

A Litany for Pain.

Is fear the thing that becomes the mind-killer?

Or is it Pain?

For whose little death truly brings total annihilation?

Pain becomes that pinpoint focus, 

And that mad abandon in search of some relief

It becomes everything and nothing and the space in-between.

I am focused on only breathing, and beating my wings against this flood.

Oh god, how it floods.

Pain is brilliant, and dwelling and insistent and enveloping

It is controlling and encompassing and devouring.

I will open my arms to Pain.  I will watch its path as it burns

Every part of me I am not sure of.

It reduces the best and the worst and the uncertainties 

Down to only what matters most:

Love.

Hope.

I will open my soul to Pain as it washes me clean of any trappings of desire.

Anything I wanted that doesn't serve me, 

Anything I am that isn't sure or whole or perfect gets burned down to its core.

"And where Pain has gone, there will be nothing."

Only Love will remain.

Go home.

Insidious, disastrous.

Catastophrous, even.

Brilliant and humbling, I grasp at straws, at my own breath

Gasping for some kind of relief.

It's not that the pain is sharp or really even all that intense

It is the relentlessness that wears me down.

It's a long-flowing stream of water that wears away rock.

It's a ceaseless wind drifting the sand ever so smoothly.

Slowly it chips away at my soul, at my body, at my life.

I am discouraged.  I am losing hope in a way I never have before.

Aging faster than I ever dreamed.

I am learning to lean hard.  Lay down and lean in.  

Listen to my body when it says no.

Maybe it's all a farce, you see.  My body screaming the quiet part out loud...

Go home.

Current

 Waiting so long to finally find it.

Putting one foot in front of the other only gets me so far.

I have these two little feet and they

Just can't go all that much further.

I'm getting better, but not.

Healing slowly, but not.

What's great about this weight is it's easily shed, this time.

Not gathered so tight about my ankles to drag me down.

It's time, darlin.  Oh, it's this time.  

There's now, and there's never, and there's lots of things in-between.

Lots of songs left to sing, lots of stories left to write.

Lots of lazy days in the sun.

For now, though.  And maybe forever... 

I gotta keep putting one foot in front of the other.

Keep peeling off the barnacles that the shifting seas laid down for me.

I might have laid down for you, if you'd give it back.

These little wind currents keep blowing, my dear.  They keep time with the seasons, the ice and the flow.

I'm afraid this time, that they're blowing me home.

Been waiting too long for the train that just ain't coming 

So, maybe I'll start finding my own way, alone.

Not mine.

Wallowing in grief that isn't mine.

I pick handfuls of diamonds and mud up, to feel them slide through my hair.

Someone else's tears and sorrow adorn my cloak and crown.

Heroes don't take mud-baths.

It drips, draining me of sense and absolving me of all my sins.

Muck that fills my lungs and falls from the corners of my mouth, 

Like blood.

Clotted blood, and this smell of iron and thick death.

I pick my teeth with its ribs.

Tiny sticks to bury, nothing more.

I grieve things that aren't mine to grieve.

I'll vomit up someone else's tragedy, hang it loosely from the rafters

Like some macrame lace.  

Puke lace.

If I hold it all in my hands again, clotted mud and sticks

If I grind it in my matted hair

Wipe it through my stinging eyes, and press it in my fragile skin, 

Will it go away, then?

Will the smell go away?

I want to snip my skin into ribbons.

I want the sky to breathe me in, 

My house should be wider than the desert...  This isn't mine.

This isn't mine.

Snip snip

 

I want to snip my skin into ribbons.

I want to feed on bones

I want the air to become me

My house should be wider than the desert.

Dreams and shifting sands of sleep

Weigh heavy on my eyes and weeping shoulder wounds.

Sand, and flesh and bones and skin

Ribs for toothpicks,

Dreams for babies 

And children

And crones.

I want to snip the air into the thousand crumbling salts it falls in

I want their ribbons in my hair

Bone ribbons

Salt ribbons

Flesh ribbons winding through us all

I want dreams that aren’t sticky

I want to breathe unsalty air

I want a home that I fit in.

I want.  I always want.

See-through

Want out, yet?

Did you find it- what you were looking for?

I found a drifting isolation, tonight

Found the validation I was hoping to find

And some comfort, too.

I’ll fake it in any way I can get it- you should try it sometime. 

It feels like love, most of the time.

Promised I woudnt have any more conversations

With ghosts.

The thing about ghosts is: 

Most times, they never really even showed up in the first place.

I know you’re here, some kinda specter, too.

Not a creep: that implies disgust, on my part.

No, you’re here out of a wraith’s confusion

Hoping to find some sliver of connection

Wandering the open sky looking to find

Some ounce of the way I used to make you feel;

Home.

Worthwhile.

Listened to.

Important.

Wanted…

Fact is: 

I was always just a ghost, myself.

You just never bothered to see through me

At all.

All. Fall. Down. Again.

 Eats away.

Pain eats at everything. 

I used to say pain was clarifying, but - you scrape it out of its shell, throw it in a blender with trauma and exhaustion and I'd ask if any of you to describe it as 'clarifying' the same.  Sure, some kind of toxic positivity bullshit might tell you to think otherwise, but - I haven't found any of that useful.

If I could think myself out of this shithole, I would have by now.

Could you, given the same set of circumstances

Come up with a different solution?

Are you really so strong as you think?

Given absence, given shame, given humiliation or boredom or isolation...

I would offer that you would be just as weak.

Just as prone to reach for the nearest source of comfort.

I have to remove the circumstances.

This isn't about me being stronger, this is about me accepting my particular set of strengths and weaknesses and the things that make me who I am.

And finding better things to do with them.

I am not the problem.

My unique set of memories makes me especially sensitive and vulnerable to this unique experience.  

I can't change the memories.  I have to change the experience.  I can change, I can change- I'm not the same?

It comes in waves.

Grief, I mean.  And growth.

It comes in waves.

Waves of overwhelmed-ness,

Of peace and understanding.

Of connection, or some isolation.

We isolate, we all do.  We carry our burdens alone;

She did

We never learned how to talk to one another,

Or really: how to trust one another.

I wish I could build a boat to keep us all afloat.

But, I guess then we’d never really learn how to swim.

This year, for me, has been about learning to swim.

I’ve been just-barely-not-drowning for so very long.

Had to jump out across the ocean to find a new place to start.

I’m still really just starting.  Finding my way 

Through the waves.

All Fall Down.

 I walked the whole labyrinth, 

Laid my skin and soul bare and left it drying, met a 

Minotaur of my own making.  

I fought him with fists and furious excuses.  

He thought me a mess, a spurious muse.

We ended up making friends and playing some spite-less game of chess 

by the sea.  

My monster, and me. 

 

He schooled me with a sneaky rook or two, but I hooked him in the end.  

I heard from the son of a shopkeeper 

That the son of the sun was horsing around- 

Drove his carriage right into the ground

Left his sister crying

Her tears turning to sweet amber

We all fall down, you see.

The sun and the moon and me,

We all 

Fall 

Down.

You would be, too.

I have escaped, tonight.
Into some foxhole of comfort, walls as thin as paper but somehow 
I'll take it.
I'll take anything fucking anything that doesn't feel like that.

Meditate?
You meditate, motherfucker we are so far gone beyond meditating when all of the wall have eyes and you can smell blood with your fingers and you dream waking dreams of glass and mud and tiny saw-teeth grins and bandages...
You meditate.

I can't be in my skin, anymore, man.
My soul hurts.

My body has been telling me, shouting at me, screaming at me all day:

FUCKING LEAVE.

Only, I can't.
None of us can, that isn't an option so where else do I go?
I've a body committing mutiny, a mind trapped in a faraway place and I'll go anywhere but here.
So, we got another earthquake.
Another tide to ride out
Figure it out. Back me into a corner, got windows to my left and a bottle to my right, I'll take the bottle sir.  This is why I'm drunk.  It's just easier, and: given the same memories, you'd be fucking drunk, too.

Tell me you wouldn't be drunk, too. 

Reli.Able.

 “I am not what I have done.

I am what I have overcome.”

“I could never have done this if I wasn’t sober.”

Well, I wasn’t sober.  But I was trying 

Working hard to find a place to work from.

Trying hard to find my feet

To find the ground.

I am still fragile.

Still have mountains to climb,

“Fourteeners”, they say.

But this time, I got to be there.  

I made a decision that I’m proud of.

Momentum, they say.

Is everything.

Far. Away.

 Some days we weep for sorrow.

Some days, it’s for for happiness, 

Or emptiness.

I’m glad I don’t pour my emptiness into my hands, anymore.

Some days it’s grief: for friends, for memories, for dreams and all the things you dreamed for me.

But mostly, I weep for loneliness.

I know you are lonely, too.

I know you hoped I’d be there forever, and now I’m not anymore.

I know you check in, here: to see what I’ve been up to.

To see who I’m becoming, 

Without you.

I’m grateful, for all you gave me.

I can’t breathe life into your dreams,

Any more than you can heal my strange wounds.

I love you for breathing your own life, fanning your own flames. It took a lot for you to realize you deserved it.

Keep breathing.  

I’ll keep weeping.

Someday, we’ll all be gone to dust and fairytales.

And I’ll miss you.

Shaking the rails.

 She growled and grabbed and gurgled her frustration.

At her body’s sudden betrayal:

broke all its promises too soon.

At me, at God, and anyone walking in the hall.

All I could do is hold her hand as she

Squeezed and gurgled what I imagine to be 

Thank you.

Helpless, each of us, 

Her: to communicate.

Me: to offer anything more than the tiniest of comforts.  

I ache with sadness, grieving a little for her crumbling 

Dignity, and a little for my own humanity.  

I’m not a God-fearing woman, 

But if I were, I’d pray tonight.

Please, O God, someday when I too

Am 64,

Don’t leave me in that terrible half light

Don’t tear my body for the sins of my mind 

To leave me half awake and

Half asleep.

Let me be, or if I am not to be, 

Spare me from shaking those rails, myself.

Story.

There's a moment of clarity, there.
A moment where a spark becomes a flame,
A quantum collision of intent and momentum,
Of experience and consequence
Where a life fades into death
The point where all confusion and possibility and chaos coalesces and contracts into
A single

Solitary

Place

It's a meaning, a home, a purpose
It feels like a destiny.
It feels like God and like endlessness and like the ocean
It's a sharp left turn before impact.
It's the top of the rollercoaster, just as you start to
Fall.

It's the last breath you take
And the first time you scream
And the moment you knew
You were so very alive.

"You write the stories, I'll take the pictures."

Oh, what stories we'll tell.

What breaths we'll take, and 

What impacts we'll make together.

Not that ocean.

Oh, would you.

I’m not the angel you are looking for.

I’m not your solution, or even
Your brief hiatus from some
So painful solitude.
I am here, though.  And not leaving.
I am afraid though, and not gonna lie about it but I am

Afraid I’ll love you.

I’m afraid I’ll fall so far into your
Too good to be.
Too interesting to be
Too hardworking to be
Too loving to be
Just too much to be
True.

You know, I’m the one of us with the carrot.

You know I am the one more activated.
I have you captivated.
So, show me.

Good god you have me so captivated

I say

And here I am, am I asking for something I couldn’t ever
Give you anyway
I have built myself a house of straw,
So many stars shining brighter for it,
How do you bring that light to me?
You want all of me,
You’ll get it.
Ain’t nothing left we either have to lose
Or really to gain anyway.
I wasn’t missing you, before you came along,
But I sure as fuck am now.

Maybe I want you,
Maybe I don’t even know better.

Maybe I just want to be wanted and cared for
And to feel small and listened to and cherished for
Who I fucking am.
Rather than the ways that I just reflect someone's tenuous
Success.
Oh, to be worthwhile
Oh, for my thoughts and opinions to matter
Oh, for someone to pay all of that glorious Attention
So selfishly, to

Me.

Oh for someone to give me the same

Courtesy.

Every question ever asked was just an opening.
If I could change everything about me,

I’d keep it the same if I could keep it 

The same about you.
I know all of the times I was embarrassing.
My cheeks still flush hot today,
What is love even made of?
What are we even worth?

It takes an ocean not to break.
And I am not that ocean.

Oh I am not that ocean.

Examine.

Gave too much away.
Tripped on my good intentions.
Didn’t fall so much as jumped.
Facing my bad decisions one by one, and finding
If you were me, you might have made them too.

Maybe I’m making excuses for being tired
For laziness or sensitivity
But I hurt for her.
I hurt for all of them.
For all the times I could have stood up and said something
But was silent.
I have power, I am powerful
And I was quiet.
I am sure she made herself clear
I am sure she said no in every way she knew how
And I am sure you didn’t listen,
Because you never really do.

Examine yourself, then.
Examine the why and whom and where and now
And then storm the last of that temple, anyway.
We tear each other apart in the name of some faceless god
In the name of someone else’s idea of better.

I was quiet.
I could have kept watch or stood witness in that holy place
I could have spread my careful wings around her
I have power.
But am I powerful.
Examine that, I suppose.