Different

And I shouldn't care
If his words move me to
Hope, to a place of wondering
If things might be more.
We haven't even met
And we've tried, but been foiled,
So is it a sign we should give up?
Or is it a sign we should have faith
In what is different
Than we'd hoped?
It's all too much
Yet just enough.

Life is water

The water flows and feeds,

Stagnates and drowns. 

It pools in poor places

And rises up and is cleansed and rains

Back down on bare earth

And makes it grow.

It floods out dreams and washes them

Anew. It births new life

And carries the dead down and away.

It is wasted

And cherished and cursed and wished for,

It is weak and strong, it freezes and scalds,

It is all things. 

Life is water, water is life.

May you ebb and flow with it. May you carry on.

Foundation

I'm small inside
With big pain
I want your strong arms to reach 
In, hold that part that hurts
All the time
Except when I can see you,
Smell you, feel your shoulder
Under my temple
And your soul at my feet
With mine.

War

And there he goes
Back again to war, with
Himself and back to
Where he knows he will
Be too tired to think
About what he thinks
He has to fix, has to heal,
Has to be to right
The wrong-thought life
With its wrong-way dreams
That never turned him in
The right direction, being
Flawed, fundamentally, like they
Told him is a medal that he wears
And wears himself to the ground
While it drags a path in it
Telling people and himself more loudly
"There's nothing wrong with it,"
But he knows there is.
And he sees it in her eyes but
They're not strong enough
To make him stop,
To make him pause,
To make him make a truce,
Find some peace that he craves
More than life,
More than his guilt,
More than her.

Revival

Until it took me so far 
Down into the bowels 
That wept for themselves,
And all the wishes in the world
Were given me and I,
Too full of excrement
To want it wished instead 
For less.

And all the signs grew silent then
And all the light grew dim.
And all the loathing in the world,
I buried in my skin.

It happened while I dragged
My head along the sullied
Ground I'd chosen
For myself that a small earthy bit
Of wall did fall
And leave behind it
One small earthy, dusty beam of light
My eyes could nearly 
Focus on.

With all the will I'd left
To me, as I lay on the floor, 
I signaled toward the muffled voices
That I heard beyond the beam
And first one,
Then two, then four
Blessed pairs of hands did carry me
To standing first,
Then safety gave me

Strength enough to start the climb
Beyond the hell of one small world
Filled only with the smell of death
And lack of self, and lack of breath,
And lack, and lack.

And I will climb now toward the brightness of a life
I had no right to feel no right
To live.

Parallax

I didn't know you yesterday when you broke


My heart again just when 

I thought we'd had a break through

Like you no longer knew me or, more realistically,

You never have.

You spoke as if to someone else; another, meaner, 

Narcissistic girl with an inability to understand

The basics of communication,

Inventing a life and timeframe for me

That I wasn’t there for,

Nor, I’m sure,

Were you.

I do not know what happened

Or how it came about that you

Have come to see me in this way

And I know there are two sides to stories

And I know there are two sides to coins

But when you flipped mine for me

And called them for yourself,

Forgive me, I forgot to ask

To call them out myself

Because when I was young you told me

Clearly where I stood.

And when I finally asked,

I sort of knew how things would go.

Deep down I prayed for something new

But sometimes

Things don’t workout as they should.

Angels

Swirls of dust and dank
Like the smell of bad past and future mixing
Bring you back,
Bring back forward,
Bring you still, and not in the
Kind way.

"The day I do it again will be the end,"
I said, and yet I did it
And yet I am still here, though a whisper
Without the strength to see ahead.

Turns out I do not need it
Because angels have placed me
In a box for now
Where I can rest and they promise
To carry me far away
Where I can be safe.
Where I can be quiet.
Where I can find my strength again.

Best intentions

And somewhere in the eaves it shook;
A small
And hardly sounding creak
Or whisper, or a shout that took
A time of deafness to perceive.

And somewhere in the soul it snuck
Around
The years of insular
Defeat. Despite your best intent,
Your wakeup call can still, indeed,

Be missed. While life, and all the rest
Does drown
The ability to hear
What you, still open, wanted 
For yourself,
But missed while lost in fear.

A life worth living

It takes a true and special sort
To see what no one wants to.
It takes an even stronger soul
To stick it out though you may want to

Run or spit or take revenge
No matter how deserving
Your foe or friend or foe again
May warrant it, but life, unnerving

Has a way of working out
Or dragging down the best of 'em.
In short, it is a choice you have:
To float or sink with the rest of 'em, so,

Take care how you decide to go.
Dare goad the fate you're given?
While avoiding what you are,
You may just shun a life worth living.

Walk you over

Within the depths of sadness
That surge within the deepest souls
And the most shallow
Lies, always, despite
Your best unintention
A glimmer of hope, lying
Imperceptibly inside the din of dismay,
The shlep of everyday daunting,
And willing you
To sleep, but your soul
Is awake,
Even when you'd slept through it
And the millions
Of thousands
Of eons of times you'd tried
And the times you'd been left
Behind you,
Now,
Peacefully, resting restlessly on
The glimmer of the hope
Of the dream, and it persists
And exists because
Someone saw you on the floor
And someone chose to pick you up
Rather than walk you over.