If you're going to live with your head in the sand
I beg of you, inhale.
Otherwise
Take an ear
Turn it upward
And listen
Til your lungs scream and threaten you
Keep listening
Til your legs shake and muscles burn
Listen further
Until you start to loathe the sand
And you see the unpredictable open air as the luscious power it is.

Depression is a cage.

In the brilliant turning of foliage, a ripe green to a fervid red, a weighty dread follows close as a shadow
and grows longer,
tenacious.
I'll be cajoled into six sides of jointed aluminum
shrinking on the daily
until my lungs are flat and stiff as a starched collar.
My chest is concaved, a ******* wound.
I am prisoner to my elements.
Stockholm syndrome
And I can only succumb
to the unsettling security in immobility.
This cage provides my structure,
and I grow accustomed to it
Giving in to its indifference

A dismal awakening in
six moons
and the hatch door springs open.
I'm anxious and cursing the piercing golden beams for
my muscles have atrophied
and a faint memory of bipedal motion comes rolling in.
The cage disappears
But I'm weak, immobile still and
resentful of this freedom
and the work it requires.
Slowly I wiggle my toes, I turn side to side
and listen for the cracks and pops of my fragile frame, harnessing a solar energy.
Feeling returns, filling the concavity in my chest.
Im flooded.
Free now
but timid
My skeleton is dusty from disuse
I stretch and cry out.
Tendons, ligaments regaining their power
Breath returns and
I turn towards the Sun and exhale fully, sending sparks flying.
In respiration, though, I note that static fear, warning me that my liberation comes with a debt.
I am eternal animate obligation.

When my head was through the trees, soaring past the outer limits of our atmosphere and touching the winking star tips, those barely perceptible by the unarmed eye,
I peered into the redness and gnashing of the arbors.
They stared back. They gnashed and smirked, growing more eerie, more perilous.
I sunk deep in my canvas seat, and feared the dark overwhelm inherent within.
My breath grew shallow and pinpricks laddered up my neck.
The calm returned, with aid, in stories of t-shirts, family, middle fingers to power.
And I pondered if peace would follow once the me I was in that, or any, moment, made nice with the toothy demons.
"The darkness in me acknowledges the darkness in you."
We nod in effortless concession and pass all moments by, unhindered.

Yes
I'm a dummy
So use
my body
To send your message
All my words are yours
Since you've inserted yourself in my
cavity
Dumb and speechless
without you
I come to life in your presence
And alone
I'm stiff in a pine wood
box.

In truth you live through me
And only through these felt lips can your truth come
Intently tinged by this cynic, sardonic, wise
***
This piercing needle through your wanton
hubris
I'd turn this wood to flesh
But what would you have left to
burn for warmth
To use
And use up.

Those magnetic moments
leave me clammy with
guilt and yet
beading with the shame
of shamelessness.

Can we kiss out the heat between us?
as though passion
were a black plastic lighter
and each kiss burns
a "click" of butane, in hot
succession until just firefly sparks
remain.

No
this heat is doused with salt
water, inciting a satin catharthis.  
Unrelenting
these fat tears turn the flames
to smoke.
I am strangled, gasping for a hint
of sweet relief and
begging for the air I waved off, thinking it had
grown stale.

I can't tell if I love you or
my ego does.

When I open my mouth
Someone else sneezes
The door bell rings
The kettle starts to call
And the sirens scream down the way

When I draw in my breath
A bus screeches to halt
The jet overhead picks up speed
The coffee grinder goes
And a dog sounds a sharp alarm

When I put pen to paper those noises ebb but never completely abate.
So, ever after, I'll be making myself hoarse, trying to get a ******* word in.