The flaw runs along the length
of my pale, clay and shale torso.
A tectonic fault
brought about by wanton weather patterns
iridescent shifts
fffin the eyes
fffin the palms
forgotten hymns remixed within
embalmed Toonami psalms.
I learned how to plant trees as a child.
Often they grew, thanking me for the soil.
You’d think, after years of building life by
filling spaces for the betterment
of the (immediate) world
I would know how to re-purpose a shovel,
I would know that one needs to add each single, solid, soft layer
of earth, of mineral, of sand and solar love
one at a god damn time.
All the way from the bottom
up through the star
hidden in the bridge of my nose.
Instead, I took a 2 dimensional spoon from some cartoon on the tube
and slammed it against the surrounding edges of my canyon
smiling at the delirious, dehydrated state of the being I was, laughing at the deepening, increasingly busted state of the psyche I toiled to correct.
Shrugging sunburnt shoulders and exclaiming, with no certainty and no care for it aside, “hopefully the dust settles such that all is well and fine, the hole is filled and once again we can think about sunshine, or perhaps even a solitary emotion rooted in more than air and empty arcs.”
Would you like to know why, dear writer, you will never be worthy of the sun? Of that last cup of water, of a kiss beneath a crimson blanket as the song you hate most plays and you forget to care about the overly crusted chorus?
No matter how long you spend dreaming up a field of molten love and distant skies fit to brim with salubrious storms, no matter how many drinks you can fit behind your glazed eyes before the night is done, and no matter how few times you say “I truly despise your character”, the smoke will always fall off of that same balcony beneath the same moon and it’s neighborhood stars.
Friendly?
Ah, but no one said friendly.
It was always assumed.
Your heart is gold and your hands are cold, Halsey.
But my heart is a weak and fearful sponge, and my hands are too recklessly uncreative to find a way to say anything better about that which pumps them full of purpose, second in and second out.
I know what you’re asking, dear writer. It’s what you always ask on nights like this. Nights where, you feel you’ve finally beat enough dust into the air to hide the fact that there even is a canyon anymore. A gap of any sort. One can hardly find an uneven surface, so long as they refrain from wincing.
“What do I do? How do I finally do it? Why am I still like this, even though I am no longer like that?”
I will never have an answer better than this. This. What you are doing. Actually thinking about helping and doing your best to go and go and go until there is some sort of brighter future on the horizon, for you, or for anyone really, to chase.
Keep going. Create the horizon. You know you want to because you keep looking at it, asking, pleading, knowing it will not answer. So make it answer. Create the horizon, and dye the storms with your eyes.
I cannot help with the canyon, however. I’m a poem, not a therapist. Get a therapist, and make sure they have the right kind of shovel–the short handle one with the nice plastic grip surrounding decent iron, the one you used to plant 100 trees in a single day. Let them toil away at you, as you toil at the world. Everyone needs help. Get help.
Get help so that you yourself can help. So that you yourself can finally, maybe, perhaps at last, sing the song buried at the bottom of your canyon, the one that needs good top soil reaching all the way to the surface. The one that yes, will then need water every single day after the hole is filled and yes, the one that will need sunlight from each separate dawn until the dawn’s respective end and yes, mulch that will not simply be tossed away by the next alcoholic breeze.
You want to finally sprout? You’d like a tree that means something? A day where you finally feel worthy of a kiss, of sweet songs written with the quills of the moon?
Soil. Water. Sun. Mulch. Love.
Love throughout.
Love instead.
Love even so.
Love, in rest.
Now play me out with the droopy notes threatening to end the concert of your eyelids earlier than expected. There are jobs to do that tired folk should not be doing.
photo credit to lunacameo
wishfinger 