Last night I was hurting
I felt six years old, again
No matter how loud the music plays
How hard I cover my ears
I cannot change
The way my mothers voice sounds
It echoes from the inside

I do not remember you
You are a strange man
A nightmare
When you crawl into my bed
Your touch all too familiar
I am a mute
To your headless horseman
We are both ghosts
You, passing through my body
Haunting, screaming, possessing
And I, a detached soul
Slipping from a warm body

I ask myself
Maybe my father never knew love
That is why he cannot show it
I turn to look at my youngest brother
I never knew love either
But to him
I cannot help but show it

Run me back
To the house on the hill
To where the trees grow thicker
Perhaps that is where I get my skin from
Today, it will not hold my rage
Still, I feel contained

Here I am
Standing on the edge
This thought
Binds my feet to the ledge

If I jump
The pain won’t fall with me
And, somehow the heaviest
Weight on my shoulders
Is weightless

I know
If I took that step
It’s not right
To leave you what’s left

I can’t burden you with it
There’s no where
In your soft body
To hold my hurt
I can’t burden you with it
There’s no where
In your soft body
To hold my hurt

The space you made to love me
I could never let my pain
Take its place
So when I think of fast falling
When the edge is calling
I see your face

I know you’d go with me
On the way down, down
Told me once
I’d never feel alone, alone
But, I know at the bottom
We’d go our separate ways, way
Because heaven is for angels
And those who know how to pray, pray

I stop to think
Sway a little in the wind
Kick some gravel from the edge
My ancestors are dust
My hopes are ashes
I think of you
Of the flowers we picked
In the summer fields
Every memory of you
Fills the honeycombs of my mind
With sweet, sweet syrup

I can’t burden you with it
There’s no where
In your soft body
To hold my hurt
I can’t burden you with it
There’s no where
In your soft body
To hold my hurt

And I turn away from the edge
Light as pollen in the wind
Weightless
Weightless

I read your writings
You said “God was a woman,
But she was not mine.”
And when they say; “my God”
I did not know we were speaking
Of property
Of ownership
Are they truly a God
If they belong

Will you not tell me
Of your longing instead
Not of your wishes
For her to open her pearly gates
I know you tasted heaven once
I know you licked golden honey
From the fountain of life

It seems you will always thirst
For the juice, of forbidden fruit

I am not my body
But it is my house
A hundred years from now
When it is a vacant home
Will you rummage through my rubble
Sift through my fallen shingles
I fear to be plundered
As men often do
As sinners often joke
Of renting women’s bodies
Yet, they do not pay the price
I am a haunting house
I am not an open door
Will you not respect my frame
For the soul it once contained
Or is the time after I part with life
Squatters rights

I close my eyes
The devils choir is humming
They will drown out
The swell of the storm
Tune out
The crash of the oceans
Clear through it all
I hear your voice

The natives said, the earth is our mother
And if mine is a chasm, open wide
If she is a barren land
She is a Grand Canyon
My mother wound splits me open
Soil cracking from womb to sternum
If she does not know me
How does she wound me so

I have a heart
Like a child’s skinned knees
You may ground me
But the pavement
Makes me bleed
There is no memory
Behind my glass eyes
They are hollow
Empty, and void