If you see me on the steps,
of the tattered old church,
perhaps I have made a little progress.
Dunwich is a tough place to live,
but the folklore is rich.
In fact, if indeed I am sitting along the steps,
I would be right near a witch and a vampire,
a few ghosts,
and a revival of my spirit.

The stone shimmers,
Giving pause to my blisters,
Until momentum decides
And sole is met by wet promise
Half submerged by passing doubts
And so hope clasps joy with a cold gasp,
Gifting courage
For the next leg.

Who am I? What am I?
It's been a while since I cried
Am I a brain on top of a body?
Just processor performing code?
Well, who wrote the code?
Who wrote it?
It's been a while since I was I
I'm not a brain, I have one
I've got hardware put there by Someone else
Who am I?
I'm a computer running software I didn’t write
I'm a soul interacting with a body, a brain
Whose health I neglect on a reg

What am I?
I'm a decaying accumulation of skin
And blood and bone and neurons
I got neurons in my heart
And that's a good place to start
The heart is the mouthpiece of the soul
My identity gets ******* in the whole
Idea of my performance
And my influence
Like if I sing a song badly, my soul takes the hit
And if I lead my partner astray, the whole of me is ****
The whole of me is ****

There's holes in me
But who put them there?
I combust in small increments
My skin flies off in perfect circles
They're fragments
My heart, it's hiding behind these explosions
Hiding behind them because it causes them
Because my mouthpiece is expressing my hate
My lack of love for myself
Hate is just a word we put on the shelf
It's like darkness and coldness
Describing something through absence
Darkness; the absence of light
Coldness; the absence of heat
If hate is the absence of love I might
Just be the one who beats me
Who defeats me
Who carries my heart, my brain, the rest of me
Tied around my neck on a string that I pull through
Like my body is in captivity

I'm privileged to honor this body that I didn’t make
I'm greatly gifted a brain to maintain
My heart, my body, my brain
They shouldn't be strangling me
They shouldn't be dragged through the dirt
They should be a part of me

I am a soul
I have a mouthpiece
My heart is my mouthpiece
My brain is my hardware
That rusts and which I expend

God help me love me
And Who I am
And Who You are

God, make it so apparent to me in my falling out
That I am a part of the three-legged stool
To Love You before all else
To Love everyone else
And to Love myself
Help me see You accurately
God help me
God help this American switch culture
I am not a machine that functions at the flip
Of a switch
I am a soul, a CVT, a cable that climbs up and down
Depending on the speed of the wheels
And decelerating is okay
And (not but) accelerating is wonderful

I do not go 60MPH because I flipped a switch
I go 70MPH because I climb
I climb
God help me climb
And to falter well
And to suffer well
Humble me in my faltering suffering

I was walking down the steps and before I knew it I fell.
I closed my eyes bracing myself to feel the clang of my face against steel steps.
The thing about anticipation, it seems that it takes longer to happen before it actually does.
Freeing myself in thought I anticipated a hard fall only to open my eyes and
see that I fell right into the palm of your hand

Why not take a step towards recovery now?
I can step a away next, if I want to.  
A step might be my only way to find footing
in a space that wants to swallow me whole.
That wants my whole life for nothing.
For appearances and comfort in skin.

step one.
you close your eyes.
you close them tight.
then you press your palms
against your
closed eyelids,
until
you start seeing red spots that remind you
of a song you wrote
for someone so long ago.
that someone doesn't matter anymore,
not really, so eventually,
neither will he.

step two.
you wear a nightgown.
the one with the lacy v neck, the one
that exposes your thighs,
the one with the vintage roses.
you wear it to bed to remind yourself
that you don't have to wear his attention
like a perfume
to feel ****.

step three.
you listen to those songs.
you know which ones.
you listen to them and sing or rap along
until your throat is sore, until
your chest hurts. do it
until you don't know why you're crying,
then write a song about why
you are crying,
so that when you look back,
you can see that it doesn't matter.
heartache fades.

step four.**
dive into a body of water in only
your under garments.
force yourself
to swim,
no matter how much
you want
to drown.

I walked in to my daughter bedroom,
feeling a shudder I never thought twice.
It was an old house OK to me over 30 years
was moving it on. I had lived in homes from
the 70's now they had character.

As in we were sitting in the sitting room
and the steps of a child running briskly
down the stairs would make us mute what
was descending in volume as well as
what could be heard but the problem was...

No one had lived in the adjacent house not a
soul had stepped foot in those unfulfilled spaces.
Yet in the echoes of silent nights there were steps
on descending moments not of ours or there's.

That was in my youth forgotten images faded until
my young were born, now once again the footsteps
have followed. Things fall from ascending heights,
yet on further expectation nothing has fallen but thought.

And I wonder to what end is this becoming, as I'm
writing this and feel something watching in the
darkness as a shiver reverberates through me as I finish...