One toe tipped
Brink on the lip
Round that bounding tree
Wade and ascend until you see
Two rocks with crooked tops
Mend the bend and heed the avian's call
When you bound down
You will hear the river's sound
You are almost there
Follow the path etched in ground

Upon your breech
You will feel a wind in the tree's creak
Look for the pink flowers that peek
And listen for the spring that leaks
The journey takes weeks

So stop at the fruit bearing tree
When you are weak
Rest and prepare for the test
For soon you will meet Devil's Peak
MInd the ways you wInd

Once you spy the rocks that streak
Keep your eye out for the trees made of teak
Soon there is no sign
And the trail leaves no lines
You must move by the moon
And with the sun tell time
Here you find yourself all alone
The only of your kind

You must bare the brier that binds
And cure it with the tongue
Of the canine that bites
For the crane that flies
Holds the questions of night

When you stumble upon the prairie
And the sun is just right
Offer the indigo leaf
In the fire of the light
Say the three sacred words
And pronounce then with might

For this is the recipe
For your soul to take flight

Those rocks in the middle of the river,
The guide told me, are there for thousands of years,
I  as well, will be waiting here,
The time and the tears,
dissolving them and me,
only to become a drop in the ocean.

Immortality is just pretend
Everything's gonna break in the end
Just like wave to rocks behind the sand

Old Rocks
The rocks of the mountain
Are millions of years old
And have seen so many things
Like great upheavals
And fossils laid down
Uplifted from the ocean bed
Three miles high
Along with minerals and wealth
Adding to economic growth
Natural recourses in danger
Human greed burning bright
What existed for millions
Now reduced in decades
Some are out of reach
For now till tech improves
Mountains will crumble
Quarries devouring hills
Old rocks petering out

people ask me if my brain has started rewriting itself
If my consciousness expanded to take up the space left behind in these two months of rapid decline
Maybe in the week my eye has refused to read street signs and text messages

I am asked If I start hearing people’s locations as my sight slips further out of my reach
as if this is a neotech drama about self awareness and I am Neo
I just need to wake up, take a pill and I will harness the Matrix

more aware of my lost ness of my smallness
Of how I am I insignificant and absorbed into the collective strangeness of a crowd

It is not a different kind of light or of seeing but a falling darkness and sensing things in the night, when bats are flying low and recklessly close. When I feel the current swell around me as the unknown let’s me escape in previously grandfathered ignorance.

Tonight I am not ignorant. I am looking at a blank and dismal map. It is not filled in in the slightest.
I am rust and berry pulsing within a thick cracked skin in a sea of unbeing, only aware of where I touch the raw, colorless, and endless universe
Intensely attenuated to my body curled in fetal position
against the thickest nothing I have ever encountered.

like a slumbering geode
Filled with colorful secrets
Poised to bloom
I wait
But rocks sleep forever

His eyes were like Labrodite
Beautiful in their own way
Cracks full of color
The only thing holding darkness at bay

His eyes were like Beryllium
The brightest blue I'd ever seen
Like blue skies on the horizon of tomorrow
The day leading you away from me

His eyes are like Sodalite
They come from both the darkness and the light
They are a muddled beautiful blue
The are unique just like you

My chest hurts
I’m breathing rocks
The expression on my face
No one shall ever see

Dad, please show me the finger tracks
The flick of the wrist
To see the flint stone find its place
As it hops across the Bluestone

Dad, please tell me how to master putt-putt
How to not be such a mulligan
Rushing into things unawares

Dad, please tell me - oh I can't say it
How to keep my heart from ever breaking again

Watching me in the rearview mirror
He knows I'm there
Living in rearview

And Dad,
I need you to tell me I can stay there awhile

© 2018
Brandi Keaton

I want to be cresened
By your sunlight lips
Fornicated by your doubts
Insecure and pure
Saturated in hues unknown
Lingering
Over me
Protecting the innocent

Move through me
Like energy against the water
Or light it on fire
Either one
Is suited just for you

You are the tailor
The maker
The storm and the desire

Your lingering over yourself
Protecting the innocent
Don't worry
This place is safe for you