I can taste the salt in my mouth
Sand crunching between grinding teeth
Rocks pressed into my skin, my palms
Grit under my fingernails
Sweat dripping from my brow
Underneath the beating sun

Beating out into the ground
Old past dreams, burying them alive

Waiting to see if they will sprout to life
Or stay under the surface, decomposing
Poisoning with their debris, seeping into my blood
Like a deep infection
Growing roots I must pull out like weeds
Only to bury again

Until it takes
In this infertile soil
Finally growing a scraggly, ugly thing
That will bloom after enduring storms,
Being battered by the waves of violent seas

The wolves will come to dig it up,
Rooting noses in the dust

Keep them at the threshold,
Keep the door shut

Give it time to let it bloom
Trust in the time in takes
To make something truly strong
You must endure.

Making from scratch
The next batch
A new breed of life,
Watching it rise, covered
Yet to be unveiled, revealed
The growth a secret, kept to myself

Self-sustaining
Thoughts remaining
Only feeding into the cycle

Letting the good, and the bad
Wash over like rainwater
I like the smell in the morning

Doesn’t it let the grass grow greener?

Speaking into silent nights,
I step into someone else's shoes -
Walk the paths, late at night
Through cemeteries and past grand tombs.

They fit well, are deeply worn,
From all the readers who wore them before
And we pace, muttering,
Some fast and some slow
Lurking in the murky spaces the stanzas show.

The view is the same and the sun never rises
The eternal evening is peaceful in its quiet.
Ravens caw overhead, our mind's eye marked in lead
It sketches the pavement under our feet.

The path has been walked a thousand times,
More so, over this past hundred years
With good fortune, it will be walked again
By students of writers, and those readings through tears.
We walk in your shoes,
To see what you see
And together we share small moments to breathe.

There is art
In this catharsis

Making beauty
It's cathartic

Words and paints and splatters and strokes
Giving shape to the unknown

We hang our pieces in this vast gallery
With new halls waiting around every corner

Not to be admired, but simply to be
Here we all have our own space to believe

I want to be proud of myself and focus on what's next
But I keep coming back around to you,
Like I've stepped over an ice cream cone dropped on the ground
And I can't keep myself from glancing back to watch it melt.

Over time,
I will become more accustomed to my footsteps
Not being echoed by other mirrored sets
And watching my shadow grow long in the evening alone.

And yet I keep turning back
Because there is something fascinating about the slow death
Of what once brought smiles,
Being fed to the ants and the hot sun.

I'm moving on, even if I keep glancing back to you
Because I know I'm not coming back
And with every step I take, it hurts a little less
And I'm comforted in knowing you will soon be out of view.

I'm proud of myself
For seeing the truth.

Like excavating a great ruin
An archeologist of my own pain,
The more I dig up the more it hurts
Yet I know exactly where the answers lie.

Underneath the dirt and grime
The dust that clogs my lungs and throat
Until I can't even tell if I'm crying, because
My face is numb in the cold

My fingertips are cracked and
Bleeding, it's
Shattering
I'm losing rhythm

And yet now,
I'm on a peaceful plane ride home.
The white noise and warmth is soothing
As I relax into the padded seat.

I left a lot of bodies under the rubble.
But I am done grieving
For what I've found died a long time ago.

If I could speak to my younger self
I'd be the friend I've never had
The one I thought I did, the facade I believed

So the pain of ripping that mural off the wall
Shattered painted shards of tile all around my feet
Fingernails digging into the mortar
Bleeding jagged edges

In my mind
I'd be able to comfort myself
The way I wished you had.