On days where salty tears lick my cheeks,
or they hide just behind the cages of my eyelids,
I feel full, not hollow.
Preferable, perhaps, to the emptiness found
in staring blankly at life and seeing
the still run down like paint and the moving brake like cars
all around, helpless to stop it
as a mind crumbles into broken acceptance.
But a cup can only hold so much.
A *** can rumble angrily on the stove for only
so long before its contents spill out,
slipping and darkening down the sides
before dying away against the heat below.
Sure, we're contained, maybe like tea kettles. But
all of us have holes that whistle,
a call to what stirs inside, and I
am no different.
Every day,
my small heart shivers and shakes,
petrified by even the idea of my own steam escaping.
It rattles at the threat of an exponential scream
of evaporated failures and aborted thought
wrapping itself around my tongue and teeth
before spilling out to float in the present air,
only to hang itself
like a fog over everyone's perceptions.
I guess that's the difference between us and tea kettles,
or cups or pots.
Water moves forever in its cycle,
falling down as rain, or snow, or sleet, or hail, or
rising up into the air to mesh with it seamlessly,
adapting beautifully to the pressures of its natural peers.
But water is not sentient. It does not remember its past,
does not consider its present or future.
Water speaks a language of unquestioned togetherness and
a blissful absence of mind.
Maybe our folly is memory.
Our puffs of commentary marinate on the brains of others,
and, maybe for the worse,
ourselves.
They float around in a haze of the brain,
eroding at our integrities,
some fogs never cycling out until we rattle
for the last time.
Unlike steam, unlike water, we ponder our past forms
and our personal sins sometimes forever
until we sizzle against time's heat,
burning out at the mercy of nature
and our own kettled minds.