A cracking mind's
Most perfect find
Clawing upwards
Through the brine

A walking dream
An almost rhyme
Closest to
That fixed shrine

Above all else
Shining down
Too steep to see
Never quite found

Never to reach
With climbing vines
An asymptote
Rising blind

A formless desire
A pathless road
Bowed before
An empty throne

A need so strong
A drowning wave
Bleeding water
Strait passed the grave

My greatest work
My longest fall
Almost perfect
Not perfect all

New freckles
Form constellations
Across my pale arms
Coffee stained
Pressure points
Tiny alarms

My head
Tangles in the branches
Of an old tree
That was once strong enough
To bear all the weight of me

Now I bear it alone

In a second
In a second
In a second
In a second
I will leave you
But never because I want to
Only because there is a world outside
A world where delusions like you
Might crash and collide
With me
Somewhat surprisingly
The real life version
Of an alias without a secret identity

Oh, but my sweet delusion
The ships get lost in your eyes
In your stormy seas
And albeit somewhat hesitantly
I won't let myself be lost

You will never read this
You will never know
About the late night poems
About the places I go

I will delete my history
I will use a fake name
I will bury my feelings
I will bury my shame

I cannot tell you how
I became this way
I know only the fear that compels me
The fear I obey

And I know I am broken
But I still have every part
I have a brain
And I have a heart

And I know I love you
Although that, I will never say
And I might never make up for
All the gratitude I fail to convey

So I will write it in a poem
One that you will never see
Then I will hide my love away
Then I will set you free

I don’t remember being born
There was screaming, I suppose
And I have the documents to prove
That I existed on that day
In that specific place
With this specific name
There were three people in the room
Some papers were signed
Some papers that would matter
For the rest of my life

A sequence of numbers
Told me where I would stand
An identity was folded
Into an infant's hand

I never asked to be born
It wasn’t my fault
But with birth comes borders
An invisible box
Where I must always stay
And never hope to break away
Because all that I would be
Was determined on that day

We walk on ice
We run on ground
Our soles
Worn thin
We pound
We pound

I dream of a hand saw
Slipping past my skin
I pull out the muscle
Before the pains begin

A constant ache
The kind we ignore
Just dream of sleep
And sleep
For more

I first glimpsed death
In a hospital bed
His eyes were blue
But his hands were red

He wore the bleak expression
Of a dying man
He began to speak
But first, I ran

We met once more
On a mountain pass
Where he handed me
A broken glass

I asked him
What the glass was for
But even he
Wasn’t sure

Death visited again
Late last night
And he held my hand
Up to the light

He leaned in close
So only I could hear
And he asked
“What is it that you fear?”

“You”
I replied
Decisively
“More than anything else,
You terrify me”

“Me?
He frowned
down at his shoes
“You know,
I only bear the news”

Again
Death asked
“What do you fear?”
I stared
“Do you truly
Want to hear?”

So I thought up the best answer
I could compose
“I fear the monsters
That live in your shadows”

I searched his expression
Looking for some clue
Finally he whispered
“I fear them too”