Who has the power to play our souls like strings?
What is this memory that rattles the glass like rain?
Fragile sheets that
Precariously encase my veins.
***** me too hard and I WILL break.
Such a waste,
Blood careening down my face,
Or it poetry?

Or is it just my heart floundering at your feet
Like some kind of suffocating fish?
**** these poignant recollections and all these bits
And pieces that somehow
Seep into the deepest recesses of my spirit.

My mother kissed me every night and said I love you twice,
Right up until
The years she died
Inside,
Slowly,
Like some masterpiece gradually erased upon a board.

How I wanted to keep a little piece of what she was before!

I clutch onto a buried scrap of guilt
Drenched in the dark waters of

“I could have done more.”

Every time it is my children who lift me off the floor;
Their bright eyes
Burned into my mind
Like lanterns on the shore of a foreign sea.

My ship will never leave them.

They have that power over me.

Like you and I.

Here we are again because
I can’t walk towards that other sky
With the sunlight glinting off the rocks
And the horizon caught  
Between us.

I see those little pieces
Of my heart left behind with every mile,
And like a child
I climb up into your arms and make you carry me,
While the blood red sun is setting.

How is it that your strength can put me back together?

I guess,
In the end,
I gladly give it;
The power to make me feel
Something.
Give me the substance that overpowers the numbness.
I'll hold it inside me and go down fighting.