The weight of the world
Sits different on my shoulders
When my head
Is resting on your chest
My ribs beg to split open
To scream, my soft prayers
My devotion, into your ears
Somehow, when I whisper
I love you
I hope you hear me

You have a way with words darling
What a way to say
I am the love of a life not worth living

I don’t want you to see me like this
I don’t want to experience it, first hand, either
I cannot change it
I am vulnerable
And it has not bode well for me before

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