The deep caress of a hot and heavy air that sits outside my window
The trees that shake beneath this air and the wind it brings
The thunder rolling over the hills and creeping it’s way forward
And the rain it brings that fills the lands and in pools spilling over
Where the frogs sing their song in the night harmonizing with cicada cries
The summer storms that bring in something to be left unspoken
And the stirring of a bed half empty
I could hear the longing in these storms
Summer slouches in your absence but in these storms and it’s thunder
Your presence is rolling along with it

Down in my bed where you rested so sickly
I wiped my brow and tended to you softly
Lay there the ice cubes on my bedside table
Melting and shifting in its empty glass

My empty palm hugs the trail of your back
Dear, you need some fixing and I can help with that
I’ll turn my cheek when you’re acting astray
And reel you back in with my old shepard’s cane

Darling, the ice is already half melted
Please get better soon, I need you well rested
You hum an old tune and turned your view  
“You put up with me too much, but I don’t want to lose you”

Of course I’ll stay here, I’m caring and cleaning
Wipe the dust off of hearts that are still bleeding
I want you to like me
Whatever it takes to keep you from leaving
And you know I can take quite the beating

I walk down this hall
Feet clamoring beneath me
With every step
The floor gives in completely

And in this hall
there’s no end in sight
I stay transfixed
Circling all night

And in the time
Dust has collected
And settled in the corners
My paths been corrected

Every step forward
Walking in another
Hole I had left
Deep and retching, like some other

There are times I wish for It
To yearn and sit idly as it envelops you
Seemingly and without actual presence
Like a hot, drenched air that forces its way down your lungs
There are times I dream for It
Only in fragments, sometimes clear, sometimes fractured
Parts are always lost, it hasn’t been whole for quite a while now
To force yourself to try and salvage the aftertaste
The things that I would do for It
To the past I would unwind and the future I would create using the thread
I don’t create a divinity but something is created in me
It is a blood, It is a silence, It is profound wanting
Vestigial in thought, mutating forever in ways that can be masked and hidden in plain sight
The things that I have done for It
For a control, For an overwhelming peace creating by a thunderous desire for something
It is something of an unnamed nature, omnipresent, and on the tip of the tongue, but unspoken, It has It’s dominion
Or so I believe

I remember stepping out
Light foot falls weighed down by the white robes that had barely fit my body
Into the water.
I remember the light overhead as I grasped into the palm of another Looking out into the rows of bodies and their faces
Worn from decades of work and existence
Onlooking with warmth and resolution.
I remember the priest
Exclaiming how I have excepted His holiness into my heart and let him breath through my lungs and intertwined with my soul
How that now I can finally saved.

I look on that softly
How my eyes have seen
The rigor of the world and the disparity fallen on me
I was once something new and unscatlhen
But now here I lay with crosses packed tightly away
And sing with the voice of a heathen
In the pool of my backyard
I dip my head below
And feel the ghost of a palm that once held me under

There’s a reason, clouded by clarity, for my mind being built in stacks
And it’s been deforming and I’ve been contorting, trying to pick up any slack
Search for an answer but I think pasted her
Found it in each hand that caressed my neck
I know I will falter but something keeps me stumbling back
Because I want a loving and I need an angel

What a stressful evening he had kicked my teeth in and I’m just bleeding out
I told you by morning you’d think I’m boring
Search for an answer but I’m sure I pasted her
Shoved her til her all bones had been cracked
Because I want an loving and I need an angel
And I know just what I lack

In the night sleep does not tend to me
An emptiness lies in its wake
It begins again and then there's nothing
Surging nothingness but breathless it does not leave me
And then guilt takes its place as I recollect on it
On what has left me to what I am today
And how word by word
Step by step I got to this very place
And how I should have seen it coming
But how transformative this is
How I become angry
I am left alone sitting in the dark and angry
A festering rage that blinds me while I stare endlessly at the wall as if it feels what I am
As if it can understand and tend to the pyre
Offering nothing but nothingness I try again each night
And maybe once it will be different
And it will all make sense