Yes, I know that words are wind,
but you need to remember where I'm from.
I've got tornadoes in my blood,
and the walls that surround you are thin.
Even the cellar won't save you.
There's no logic in burying yourself
in the ground to keep the sky out.
The taste in your mouth is the dirt
from your grave and the ashes of your faith.
Have you ever stood against the gale,
let it take your skin but leave you standing?
You don't understand the nature of weakness.
You have no idea what it takes to make a person hard.

We carry it inside,
the sea and the sky,
the stardust that made us.
I was once a blazing green aurora,
a defiant glow at the top of the world,
but I knew, even then, what I would be,
and I had no power to stop it.
Human will is useless against the engines of creation.
The star that birthed the essence of me burned away
all knowledge of my existence the second after I began.
There is a long night at the edge of what we know,
dark and beautiful and terrible to behold,
and that void does not remember us.
No matter what greatness we aspire to,
we will toil in obscurity and then fade.
We will live and die for nothing and we will not be missed.

I crawled naked
through the fires of redemption
and I felt nothing.
I felt nothing,
with blood running down my arms,
and tears carving canyons
through what was left of my baby face.
The river ran through me
the same way the blade ran me through.
We wrapped our hands around
each others’ throats,
and together, we felt nothing,
but, for a moment, nothing we had ever felt,
had ever made us so alive.

You never loved me, but you needed me,
graceless form, but solid function,
a stiffened spine to wrap your life around,
the unbent shoulders holding up your silly world.
Now I revel in all the ways you are unable to break me,
the hollow thud your skull makes ramming into
the brick wall of my unshakeable resolve.
I loved you, but I never needed you.
I’m not fool enough to build an anchor with feathers,
to pluck the brightest bird down from the sky
and set him upon the sea of tears I’ve already cried
in anticipation of the way he will drown.
Now you revel in your freedom, the wind that carries you,
while I stand still on the ground below,
watching you grow smaller until you disappear.

There is nothing as familiar to me
as the space between the waist of your jeans
and the skin stretched taught across the muscles
below your stomach, the way your flesh calls to my hands.
My palms are rougher now than when I first touched you.
I'm more scarred, but less scared.
A thousand tiny almost deaths have made me braver,
but more than that, I know that you
would **** and die for me, no hesitation,
and that's the blood that binds us,
sticky on your fingers and salty in my mouth.

The body casts a shadow
on the back of my mind,
girl-shaped, rotting in a forest,
where no one knows its name.
It was a person once, and loved,
before it wandered too far afield,
into a darkness filled with envy
for anything that has a light inside.
It didn't know its life could be taken
at any time at all, gone in an instant,
flesh stripped from bone,
sightless eyes pecked out
from a withering skull.
Maybe it would have chosen differently,
if it could have chosen anything at all.
We are all destined to become bodies,
mere shadows of the human beings
we always took for granted that we were.

When you crawled up out of the mine,
there was a hole where your brain had been,
and you tried to fill it up with moonshine,
but your son still went to war to get away from you.
You both knew that the smell of burning flesh
was part of a suit that would be ill-fitting,
but he had no future under the mountain,
or in the liquid pouring out of the still.
Under the stars at night, you studied him,
this creature you had made, and found him lacking.
You punished him for being solid,
with no formula that you could adjust.
You never loved him.
He smelled too much of fear.