The blanket-dust lifts like a sheet,
When I find my tatty chest,
Under lock and debris.
Yesterday seems as old as the wheel,
As I curtain my hair behind ears.
The key crepitates
within the metal juts and crevices.
With a final hissing crack,
It snaps,
And the golden hue
Of past,
It blinds,
With uninterrupted stares through beryl iris.
How something can disobey time and space
As it pleases,
I’ll never know.
But as it cuts through every age I’ve sewn,
And halves the height of grown,
And dyes my ego black and white,
I’m rerouted —
To a new me (or an old me?),
In every photo leering back.

As the marsh marigold grows from the swamp,
So too, do I grow from ugly things.
When gloom builds a village around me,
I make friends with the community,
And decorate the walls of the houses
To fit my taste.
And just as the new branch grows from the severed stump,
So do I.

The sun greets me in pieces, through the evergreens’ needles and limbs,
Tickling bits of dust particles,
And air-born, fluttery spores,
Soothing my goosebumps.
But the wooded labyrinth has a magnetizing aroma,
One of eerie descent
That I can’t let go of,
Even with the subdued lullaby of warm, midday light.
I crave the unnerving mystery
That the tall, stoic, ligneous soldiers give without hesitation.
I want to be caught with my heart in my throat,
And my breath unattainable.
I want their twigs and wiggly things
Wriggling in my core,
And hear my heartbeat thumping: “more!”
And befall my breathy song;
My wail
That never ends
Until I find the forest center.
Where most are lost,
I’m found.

I looked at the circle
And it was a square.

Friendly emotions
Are divisible by small numbers,
But crowds give me a bad taste.

I click the metal counter,
I’m at 26 questions starting with “why”,
And my memory
Is a dish of expired food in the fridge.

A figure of many
Futures
Stands at my front door,
But I don’t answer
To unexpected guests,
And my mailbox is a
Pocket of regret.

My attempts like dirt on buckskin,
But the moon
And sun
Both know the time I put in.

If only they could speak for me.

When the life inside my head
Infiltrates the life that others see,
I am the servant to emotion.
I am the sleeping circus lion behind iron.

When others see the best in me,
It’s unrequited.
How can we reside in a place we’re uninvited?
And we pretend we like to fight
For the issues we birth.
The hearse we take turns driving to the cliff,
To **** it again.

Five fingers.
Five fingers too late, and an empty plate.
Wasted day.
Wasted fate, wasted away.
They say it’s always darkest before morning,
Yet dawn is a moment that we sleep through.
We miss it,
We reel it in with fishing rods,
We wish it near,
We kiss it when it’s here.
But we are usually too busy to see it,
Our beady eyes focused on reliving the past.
Misery will attach like a leech.
And regret is a creep
Who lurks in the woods behind maple leaves.
Above closed eyelids
Does hope make a home.
Overcoming what’s been done
Is not a race of hare and tortoise,
It’s the bullet of a gun.
I am a foreign song,
Resident of a place I don’t belong.

“Fear is a place”,
I told the hissing shadow.
“You can’t choose if you end up there, but once there, you can choose whether or not you want to stay”.

Fear was baffled,
And bellowed, suddenly, like a bronze cannon,
“I’m real just like you! How can I be a place if I’m standing right here”.

“Because a real person still exists if you walk away.”

Don’t ask why all must end —
Without end,
There would not be beginning.

There would not be reason,
Or lesson,
Or strength.

Without death,
No life.
No wonder,
No loss.

Toxins would fester beneath skin,
And without ending,
Your patience wears thin,
If nothing ends,
We give in.
Nobody wins.

Without closure,
Without moving on,
Without change:
Doors stay closed,
All is mediocre,
And bland to the taste.
Nothing improves.
Everything stays.

Don’t ask why all must end.
We know pain like a close friend,
When the end visits,
And it costs us large sums
Of ourselves.
But beginnings are not born
Without help.
New life doesn’t sprout —
The fungus doesn’t grow
Without the fallen green turning grey.

Don’t ask why.
It ends because it must.
Trust the stops the train takes on the way.
Grieve,
And cry until sober of sorrow,
But know,
That today’s end
Brings tomorrow.