In a game of one It’s nice to think that someday There’ll be a two In the game called life Happy endings are the ones That are created from Those moments when The whole world falls apart And the only way to contain it all Is by lying under the wooden slats of a bed frame And feeling the press Of those sturdy wooden bars Dig into your head Because you can’t contain the outcome You can’t make it just appear out of thin air Like a filthy magic trick or sleight of hand Life just doesn’t work that way It brings heartaches and sickness Moments where you cannot get out of bed Mornings where you lie awake Questioning the just and quick of reality And the mysteries that lay within it Embedding themselves wrapped around a system Of congruent vines that are almost touching The pole to which to climb But it all takes time Moments where your brain is a tyrant And your dreams are so realistic That you dare to put forth and live in this Minutes to minute frame Ticking by slow or fast or slow or fast or slow And those dreams speak of fear and wonder Of grand libraries and future lovers Of doubts and claims on meetings That haven’t even happened yet That is when you have to reach inside And pull those doubts out Like the removal of painful wisdom teeth Crowding your mind Crowning at the edges The white poking through pink gums When you finally realize That you can’t control Everything that occurs No matter how hard you try And each boundary gets bigger As the freedom dares to taunt and swallow you whole In one big gulp You are Jonah inside that whale Searching for an answer You can’t see through the thick wall of baleen Because the thickness is murky You sit stubborn waiting For a miracle to happen But that miracle is you And you realize this now Typing out a poem at three am When people start to go to sleep You have just woken up To reap the benefits of night And all its flippant grasp And pull of darkness But being Jonah You know that in the belly of the whale Is not a dangerous place to be in In fact it’s quite comfortable Also humbling by making you sit tight And think to the maximum capacity About who you are And where you are going In this great speck of universe dust You call home So much like Jonah after He escaped the game and emerged Stronger than ever Free of childish notions A fully formed adult Or at least a resemblance of one That stepped into the light After years of dingy darkness A lift off out of the cavernous hull Of bright pink flesh that was once his humble abode For so long he knew of nothing else And then like you his hands parted the baleen Like parting thick coarse hair with a hot comb Head emerging like a second birth into the open blue