Grief is not a song you wrote once
Nor the padded, downturned corners of your face.

Grief lives below your footsteps
A black hole with mass
in the shape of a giant ape.
Each of your labored steps begets its sweeping swing below.
Your soles are its vines.

Between each footstep, as it moves with you
you think the weight of it might be gone.
Grief delights in this deception
as it seizes up-down once more,
reaching into the core of you
and pulling it to the bottom of your shoes.
Some part of you, torn away, lands with a leaden thunk
and cramps the delicate inner muscles of your feet.
Maybe it’s the soul
or more likely
it’s some forgotten vestigial *****
which only emerges through its own absence.

Now hollow in your middle
the muscles surrounding contract in confusion
thinking, knowing, that the empty space is wrong
but not quite able to recall
what had been there in the first place.
and so you think your heart is seized by grief,
when really, you are confused, you are feeling only
nothing.

as Grief lives beneath the ground
as Grief swings beneath your feet.

Some things in life are free, some things will take a banana from your chest drawers.
However many miles a road is that men walk down must,
at the end I hope there is a crew of construction workers
that all they really need is ice cream with chocolate syrup, all they’ve ever needed.  
They realize the waves of sound in the air are made out of ice cream
and the swinging of their arm splays out chocolate syrup like rainbows.  
This would happen in the latent way that apples happen, sprouting slowly from the root
and the secret’s on the inside blooming with a star
but meanwhile forming a hide that’s either crisp or chewy.

Biting down on air is a maddening sensation
and the upper and lower jaw blame each other;
contact every time is a betrayal.
They have no one else to blame but whom they meet on the other side of the empty room.
My jaw speaks and clicks in jerks. I do not understand but it is ok.
I like to be a woman of mystery.
I like to be a woman of mystery even when I can’t understand myself;
it is ok.

The day I found the inside of me
with the crust of eggshell still atop her head she emerged,
already speaking the truth as I had never known it.
Already husking away the lies of the self
which had held me into hopelessness
she emerged. She spoke
to my own glistening eyes before me, she said,

"This is the condition, my dear
(my one true love)
(my only source of god)
that envelops creation and stretches back into the yawning mouth of the first atom
it is
to be
alone.
To die and birth alone
to cry and rage alone
against the bind of all things that makes you
what you are and
what you are not.
When you feel it deep in your belly clawing at the make of matter,
know that we all claw, we all throw ourselves against
the high ceilings of our skulls and strive
to find another home.
But I am with you,
cradling the wound, healing it with slow, careful
kisses of the self.
I am with you, I am
the oval that surrounds your heart
the Eye within.
I am the last left
when you seek all source of comfort.
You can hide in me."

And with that, she returned home
settling into the crescent in my center.
Gone to the eyes, but still in every bone she speaks,
she whispers,
*You are not alone
as I am here.