my entire life
has been one long unread red
suicide letter

If all the corks from all the bottles of wine I’ve drunk
were to fall into my lap I’d promptly be buried
and likely suffocate.

If in their crates all the bottles of wine I’ve drunk
were to appear clean and unbroken
I could build a house.

If corks and bottles and crates were not lost to me
floor mat sea glass bricolage
I could scrape the sky.

If we could compress
What we carry, page by page
For origami

Flaw, fear, hope, anger
Strung up as ten thousand crane
Kami no kami

Blood deckle edges
Papercut decoration
Fidget, crease, balance

Void telling highlight
Strong, vulnerable, reveal
Awe when you step back

See these cranes in flight
Spread across the vast expanse
The skies of yourselves

You, in the corner,
Pink shirt, emboldened mouth
Venerable, holy truths unveiled
Art, love, written upon
Pages of you, he
You write on me
I find you transcendental
Phosphorous breath limns October
Air wreathed to flame
By words in air
By ink on linen
Transformation, the long road
The distance of feet
The window bay between
You and I, enthroned
Your words, my ribs

Perhaps you think to yourself:

“If only I could leave
this world for another one,
where I haven’t made mistakes,
where I’m not so alone,
where he/she/they still might live…”

I too think such things.

But mind the gap, friend.
Would you leave everything behind?
What would you learn there?
What wouldn’t you learn there?
What if you can’t return?

Worse perhaps if you can.

You do not cut the heads off a hydra, lest they should split, and two strike in place of one, no, learn from Hercules.

You burn the body and salt the bones and tar the earth where it fell.

You hunt the monster as a hatchling, route it out with dogs like a boar from the thicket before it can mature.

And if those who are the evil, hiding behind less monstrous faces, have hidden the torches and salt, slain the bloodhounds?

If heroes have been outlawed, the knowledge of ******* the monsters written out of history, truth become legend and legend lost?

A new generation of heroes will rise, from the most humble seeds, germinating under Promethean fire, and rediscover the old ways.

A maid will take her hair and braid it, cut if off and make it tinder for a torch, gather from her tears their salt, offer the strength of her arms.

An armorer, crippled, will limp on, and craft spears to heckle the beast, and a shepherd will make of the sheepdog a war hound to protect the flock.

Do you hear the earth pushing up, the shears and the lamentations, the blacksmith anvil ring, the baying on the moors?

You will.

It's easy to take back words
That someone has yet to read
When you put them down on
Pixelated screens rather than on paper.

Paper keeps the marks, absorbs them
And no matter the eraser kisses
They remain, shadowed, a palimpsest, waiting
Betraying you if anyone really looks.  

The backspace button, though, my friend
Snuffs out incriminating words, murders them,
And I envy such simple magic,
Despairing it cannot delete my mind.

It fails me, the weight remaining
Ill balanced, to sprawl across vertebrae,
In the hollows of my collarbones,
Beneath my tongue, behind my teeth.

All the things I cannot say,
Not in my own gray matter,
Not allowed in voice or print,
That flèche gauche waits, ever hungry.