I’m beginning to notice
how lonely I've been lately

Every breath is a steady unassurance
Dismissive,
Wildly accusatory

Summer left--
And with it,
Sunken splotches on my face
Freckles the color of tree bark.
Golden hue on the backs of my legs and tops of my shoulders,
An oil canvas gathering depth

But fall is here,
life transitions away from the heat
Even the Earth tilts away, shielding its skin

My body touches the ground and feels an echo
As if emptiness could speak

As if depression was cognizant enough to stir the grasses and whisper to me
Encouraging the deep draw inward into hollow vastness
Peeling away the fibers and stripping me down
Pointing up into the infinite blackness and saying,

Stay there.

I look out over the crests
Undulating like the ribcage of a
Subterranean creature.
Breathing in, exhaling the spittle of brine
Caked onto my lips and eyelashes.
The sea is different today.
How it moves, wildly serenading me
With the forgotten
All of the things I have forgotten.
Pieces of me have fallen into these waves,
Cracks of skin like the chipped linoleum
On an old kitchen floor
Drop heavily onto the sand
Sink into the shells,
It weeps.
My vertebrae stretch ever so further
With each fragrant rush of salt air
And I recall those poems
That wafted from afar and came to a rest
On the tips of my fingers,
Like rosebuds that were *****
And shrunken dry with neglect
But beautiful in decay.
I watch the sea today and it is a startling
Stranglehold
As the sounds of the pouring ocean floor
Grip into me with razor teeth
I know
I have left too much of myself behind
In this very same spot.
Yet the emptiness that drifts within, and
The old self
Brushing against my ankles in the sand,
Like an abandoned blanket
Is reassuringly the most naked elegance
That flutters through my chest
And expands outward
Into the gray.

Shrouded in branches under the rhododendron thicket, I remember
A time when I did not second guess at being brave.
Peering through a looking glass
My world tilted on the edge of
the universe--
To create is to die a thousand times as an imposter,
Reincarnate as a master.
Beheading the strawberry flower
early in the season
to yield more fruit, later.
In moments of insanity
real logical progress happens,
masked in spontaneity.

The blue jay swaddling seeds in its crop
Mechanical bird with singular purpose
Notes a mechanical song,
Lives to forget--

For every acorn he caches in rotten trunks
Or clay soils, with abandon
Another rebirth
He gives life to the forests by inadvertently,
statistically, giving one seed a much greater
chance of ever becoming something
than the rest.