Eviscerated, grabbing desperately to keep up with the spilling of everything I've held in all this time. All that once belonged to me, ripped open and unravelling. Past repair. The shock of fear, the shock of unnatural emptiness where emptiness should never be.  

The thing I thought I would never lose. My self, now a pile of unrecognizable parts.  Breath catching and trembling in my throat. Frozen in the thought that I cannot come back from this.

Knapsack full, you keep looking for the last piece.
The missing bone. The fragment.

It pulses, somewhere in the dark, calling to be part of the whole.

The parts of my body, scattered to the ends of the earth in that one moment,
when I was forgotten.

Too eager, child.
You drank it all up. Every. Last. Drop.
The shoe has dropped
The teeth have been kicked in
The salt has been rubbed
The breath has been knocked out
there's nothing left, child, but to wait for impact
dead end.

For the briefest of moments,
a few shallow breaths,
a rolling shock of cold numbness creeps
as my gaze falls on the sleeping face next to me.
the short burst of amnesia leaves me adrift
untethered
as if I could slip off the edge of the world
a world and a self that seem for a moment, so unrecognizable
so wrong, I shake my head, I must have this wrong.
All is lost, it has always been lost, in that moment.
Then the warmth returns, and I see that it is my life laid out before me. I am no visitor here.
The haunting feeling that I have known this truth before. This eternal emptiness
lingers
just around the edges
the opposite of deja vu.

Waiting on the bone collector

to come collect the pieces I left her.

The pieces of bone from this ragpicker

She grinds them for her white gunpowder.

To shoot me up
or shoot me down

when that bone collector comes to town.

You were the magnet
that pulled me through.

Now you've turned me the wrong way round
I can't get close to you.

You're cold water
strike bone and run on through.

You were the sound
I followed every note.

Now it's too sharp
my words fall flat
there's only blank space where I wrote.

You were the taste
like honey on my tongue.

Now I can't keep the bitter gone.

I'll hold this space
between kind words we didn't say.

I'll hold this hope
against all hope
that tomorrow is that day.

You'll turn with tears
turned back to honey

You'll turn around
pull me back in.

and make me stay.

Beneath the raging winds,
Beneath the blinding rain,
there is a voice so quiet
you did not know it was speaking
until now
when you stopped running
you sat,
you breathed,
and heard it.

Beneath the wild drums of your heart,
a quieter world
The one voice you never knew was yours.
And the world longs to hear it.