I have made mistakes, who hasn't?
I have been wrong but I still try
I have been hurt and broken down
But I am at my strongest when I cry

I have been weak and I have been blind
I have been misled along the way
But I am still able to hold my head
High at the end of each thoughtless day

I know what it is like to fall
Rejection is a good friend of mine
I have learned to accept the fact
I may never be able to truthfully say "I'm fine."

But I will not focus on the bad
Or sad songs the radio plays
Instead I'll wish for sunshine
Ignore dark clouds and rainy days

No river bed rock ever
Kisses the same water
Twice.

Autumn opens her arms
To September, and I close
My window for the first

Time since May.
I have had better
Summers. Love left behind

In a deluge of tears and regret.
Doctors sharing bad news
With honest concern;

Waves upon sand castles,
Moments; memories, then
Nothing.

I rest beneath the
Cold stream, perhaps
Allowing new waters

To feel my face in time.
For now, the rain strokes
Nothing but the glass

Of a window shut
To the chill of a dying
Summer.

I go outside to escape my self
and the end and the inevitable
and I sit admiring the night sky
until the stars become the scattered
words I’m trying hard to understand
but seem completely unable to.

I look up into that dark blue night
and I wish it was the ocean.
I wish the world was a fading purple
sunset. I wish the world was
the moonstone blue of the sea.

I’m drowning in the night sky instead,
in all this vast intangible vagueness.
There’s no edge, no shore to the sky,
just stars and then stars and then stars.

I want to be on the shore again,
feeling alive, feeling maybe, just maybe
there’s a little hope in the waves that
have always been able to comfort me.

See, the sea is full of lonely moments,
losing moments, shipwrecked moments,
but it is also the place of liminal on the shore
moments, meeting moments, happy, maybe moments.

But here I am, sitting beneath the sky, not the sea.

I came out here to escape yet all I’ve found
is the inevitable in all its dark, vast, uncontainable glory.
I look away because I don’t want to see it.
I look away, because now it’s the end,
I’m not ready to leave.

I gather handfuls of cold to my chest
and take it all back inside with me.
I dream of the ocean. I long for the sea.