Laying among the saturated soils
Amidst the dry leaves and briers
The wood around me sturdy
Tulips urgent in growth
How can everything around me be so brave
When I am not.
When I am but a tightened voice, a hushed mind, I lay still and do not have the courage to whittle my way through the frost.
Resilient and beautiful in the decay of rock and withering thorn
As these things close in about me
I could only wish the transference
Into my own doubt.
Justification is a long-spent nightmare
Wasting closely by, sinking into the earth of my skull.
Catkins and the spines of gum trees hesitate in the sky
With no breeze, and no self-fulfillment
Never searching or wincing at another open sliver of bleeding heartwood.
It's funny how the moon has always been there, perchance
As it dangles now in the evening air
Full and light like a swan breaching a blue lake.
Almost breakable, almost surreal in strength.
Things grip to life in these woods.
Under my body thousands of dances for survival.
And here I feel it the most
A yearning that is not there, was never there,
Never born into me and never settled in my marrow.
Turning upward,
I speak my truth.
I can only be so much these wires of thorns
This tumult of leaves
Until I acquiesce to the night.

I had fallen between a waking state
And a life I believe I entirely imagined.
I imagined you, because at the time
It was everything I thought I had needed.
If only I could have one more thing
                                   If only I could run and
                                   touch you
                                   taste you
                                   scream everything
I thought you were.
My thoughts were a continuous sea of moonlight,
A familiar, nostalgic ambiance
I wrote about you beneath
so long ago.
When I believed moths were faeries,
When the fireflies died
And the eclipse kept me awake in the dissonance
of night
When my heart felt giddy,
I thought-- then, now,
I had finally held a shallow coal
That burned deeply, vehemently
I wanted to swallow it and feel it
scorch my insides.
Finally, I had become delirious
For all of the right reasons.
At that point I was simply looking
For an excuse to slip quietly
past reach.
I would rise and wander in the early hours
Of morning, and would blame it
On you
When it was merely my own soul
Screeching, bleeding
Clawing at the sad, impermanent baggage of flesh
Popping my seams undone over every pore,
Unstitching my sanity
Wanting so viscerally to be let out, escape--
Freedom….
Is what I wanted.
I don’t think I ever truly wanted you.
A lust overcoming
Was my body's way of rejecting humanity's
Trivial circumnavigation of romance.
Laying on the celestial floorboards
Watching my whirlpool of scars
                                       And all of the screaming…
I kept hearing it.
The incarceration of my dreams,
The inferno of desire I wanted to burn forever in,
Sat so prettily upon my heart
I never dared move it.

Like a battle being fought between a ship and the sea
You continually crashed into my hull
Ripping up my planks
Casting my rusted nails and wrought iron into the froth.
How was I to know
My most difficult enemy would be myself
Merely thrown together with thought
Continually romanticized.
My sails petals of the softest rose,
My stern of stained glass
I have always built myself so delicately
And foolishly.
I have fortified myself against nothing,
With the downfall of my optimism
In thinking the waters would remain calm,
That the wind would only blow gently enough to catch me
And drift me to and fro.
I've built myself out of keepsakes and memories
Old shoe boxes my cannons
An artillery of wind chimes.
My ropes knotted together with all of the love letters
That made a special place in the corner
Dusted off and given a second chance.
I've sailed the sea so passively,
I've been blissfully unaware of its dangers,
Its violence.
And so now, as my pieces turn to flotsam
And the breakers turn the roots of my keel inside out
You tear me down
And the regretful parts that float among the wreckage
Can only cry out to my demise and recollect
I have always been my own undoing.