Weight

Another morning, another lead weight in that corner of your core that has never forgotten the darkness. You try to ignore it, try to find feathers in fantasy, draw yourself to a trick of the lights like a moth careening to its fiery death. A little voice in the silence behind your rib cage whispers of salvation, tries to tell you that you already know the way to the surface. Your words lie scattered along the wayside, but a few of them get tossed together by a chance whirlwind in the gutter, form a sentence, remind you. 

For too long you have ignored the words that swirl around like a dust bowl in your gut, have let them gather and stick to your flesh, seal the paths that lead air to your lungs. Spin them instead into rope, hold them outside your self, hold them like a lifeline in a dark sea. 

The little voice in the silence behind your rib case becomes clear. Says, hold them like the surface is on the other end.

Eligibility

The rules and requirements drone on and on down the page, describing who you can and cannot be. You find yourself worried you’re not sick enough to be considered, but the way your defenses crater in answering questions you think maybe you only had yourself fooled. He writes from the homeland to say I wish he didn’t have to take care of this mess, and you have found a new word to describe yourself. 

You’ve spent a whole life trying to ensure that no one extends themselves taking care of this mess. 

No one but yourself. 

When can we call you to schedule a screening, the form asks. You want to answer that you’ll sit by the phone till they do, want to say that if tears could earn a place with them, the oceans of your eyes would be a golden ticket all on their own. 

I go to sleep early. In sleep, there is no illness. In mornings, there’s the potential for a dawn. 

2nd Ave

You spend the evening in church, preached to by the East Village’s own reverend of the Earth, reverend of the old Lower East Side, reverend of reminding you why you came to this city and it has nothing to do with God. She foots the bill, but not until you’ve spent two hours panicking about how you’ll be able to pay your half. The choir reaches crescendo and you wonder if you’re falling into the depths. Sometimes it’s hard to know if it’s illness or just poverty.

Either way, you’re crying on the F train again. 

The reason you’re dying is because you’re not spending your precious moments building stories into the sunset. This is not a secret. The reason you’re wasting away is because you’re spending your life neither here nor there, unwilling to commit to mediocrity, undaring to leap into the wide unknown. This is the trial. 

You wonder 

what the odds are 

you’ll survive January.  

You’d place a bet 

if you had any pennies left 

to place. 

Agency

With each turn of her words, she twists the knife a little deeper in your chest. Your eyes begin to flicker, you know so well the way they dance into corners when cornered, how they were always the softest part of you. She tricked you to take off your armor, lay it to the side and step into her jagged edges with nothing but bare skin against the blades. The apartment is cold, suddenly, you are tired when you shouldn't be. 

Returns are fickle, recovery like a fun house mirror. You never know what version of yourself you'll see. 

Never know which turn will have you
looking
at a monster in your stead.

If you want it

The thing is, 
you're allowed to do whatever you want
with your blank pages. 

It's been weeks (months?) since last the ink slipped past your lips, since the electrical impulses of your emotions pinballed against your rib cage and turned into literary curlicues. It seems cruel to be without one's language for so long, to be without the familiar twists of your own tongue, but doesn't it feel like muscle memory when you open the door, doesn't it feel like sinking into a pile of sweaters that carry the scent of an old lover?

I would have traded this muscle memory for your scent,
but you know that
and sweaters don't travel well
across the years. 

The regular bar simmers on a Monday evening,
as it does.
The bartender knows your order though it's been innumerable turns of the dial since last she handed you a drink. This is the mercy of New York City.
It's never so big that it cannot wrap you around its little finger. 

Never so far that it doesn't have a blank page
for you to come home to.

Sun Dance

At the end of the highway, at the base of the mountain, the road narrows to one lane curving into the canyon, wrapped in tree canopy, watched by violent cliffsides, shooting into the sky. Suddenly, after climbing countless switchbacks, the road explodes into a scenic turn, millenia in the making, ten-thousand foot mountains emerging jagged and carpeted from the depths of the earth, jig-sawing themselves against each other, pausing in the turns to take deep breaths of high-altitude air. 

We pass the peak, roll back down narrow sweeps of asphalt, brushing up against aspen tides connected by one single root, millenia in the making, everything quakes and tingles. It feels like it's the first day of a thousand new days, like you turned a corner and was finally excited to see what you might find there, after years of fearing what might come around the bend. 

August coils itself behind you, tucks in its hands and feet and rests in its accomplishments. You have no notes, nothing but gratitude. In the car on the way down, he says the end of the dream is hitting me in the form of stressing about retirement, and you only know what he means in theory. The dream still remains with you in your pocket, silent, biding its time, reminding itself through you by little nibbles along your side. You wake restless. 

The sun sets behind the mountains, your table laden with drinks and swills of writing, unfinished stories stretching their limbs and asking what comes next. You're not quite sure the answer, but you're beginning to get a sense. 

You're not quite sure the answer,
but you look forward
to finding it out.

It's the Risk That I'm Taking

Your childhood streets fall away behind the train car, glittering lakes of cool swims, late at night after the club closed, early on Sundays when parents weren't quite awake yet, long Julys when school breaks felt endless, you were born in the land of one hundred thousand lakes and they never left you, you are more water than land, more forest floor than mind. You forgot your to do list, forgot to follow your prescribed course while here, and somehow you got everything you came for. You sit on a train like moss, like generations of calm lie in your chest, it's all still there, you were never reduced to your current state, only ever expanded, you contain multitudes.

The small towns of your ancestors fly past outside the window, remind themselves to you, they whisper your name and pronounce it correctly, such is their power, such is their gift. You are a whole life of layer, a whole world full of treasures gathered, trinkets piled in the corners of your spine, you are a body made of spirit, a spirit made of woods and lakes and sunshine and moss, you are a lifetime of leaving and coming back. 

This is the heart you were asked to own.
Who are you to turn away a heart
when it knocks on your door?