For Show

The day is drizzly, a chill runs through your apartment, no sunlight makes its way all the way into your nooks, you are not mad. Little flutters of ideas, of stories, make their way through your synapses, all you ever wanted was to tell a story and it's there, somewhere, but you are only almost able to grab it, it slips through your fingers. You draw up maps for a summer on the road and wonder how you can feel so lost when you haven't even left yet. 

Wherever you go,
there you are. 

You know that's the problem

You just don't know the solution. 

Is Your Land

It is not time, you hear yourself think. This is not how we go. Thirty years in this soil cannot be lifted from my roots with an airplane ticket. Those around you scramble to jump ship and you wonder what stubborn nerve it is that always keeps you in these fires for so long. 

It occurs to me that I am looking for a fire hose.

21

How many years have passed since that bright spring morning at the end of March, at the end of innocence.

(Do you remember how the air went out of you? How you retraced your steps to see what you could have changed, how you could have a saved a life intent on not being saved, how you could have caught a body determined to leap.)

It's been twenty-one years and I still think of you every time the ledge gets too close. Remember what it means to end a life, what it means for a life to end.

I saw in you the hope I had not dared wish for myself.

Wildfire leaves too much for the survivors to sort through, to carry, to breathe. You couldn't survive the flames, so you singed everyone in a mile-wide radius, left them scarred forever in your wake. Some days the only reason I live is to contain the smoke in my own lungs, and it's as good a reason as you can get.

I went home that day and made my loved ones promise that no matter what happened, they would never make it their end. I promised the same in return, and didn't know how much of my life I'd spend fighting to keep the promise. It was an awfully high building. It was a sunny day at the beginning of everything.  You changed my life and I will never get to tell you. 

 * * *

Mostly I remember what you left when you went away. Life is finite, you have but this one. Your family has but this one, your friends. You do what you will with it, of course. But it seems wisest just to live it, after all.

There may come a day, when you won't regret it, and that day is worth all the wait.

the Nothing Art

Sundays are best kept to themselves, puttering on their proverbial stove tops, left to their own devices to meander through an afternoon. The secret to getting things done is taking a step back and letting them happen of their own accord. The first cherry blossoms burst in Brooklyn, the first awkward sunburn appeared on my arms, all of the questions are still unanswered, but you got a little reprieve and this time you do not turn it down. 

It nearly kills you, every year. 

But every year, only nearly.

Alight

Eventually, the sunlight becomes so bright that it beats itself into your synapses, no matter how hard you clench your eyes. You try to remember why you wanted to die and find it difficult, just a trick of the lights, try to make meaning of disease and find nothing of substance. It was just illness, and now, perhaps, it is over. You escaped the allure of the reaper, and now you are forced to live with the consequences. 

There's a moment in the liminal space, just before you find your footing, where you feel a great emptiness, feel yourself returned to Stardust, could be weightless, could be nothing and all you can do is hold your breath and wait to find out. You are not anchored by hope, yet, not elevated by meaning.  

Have you come for me?

Not today.
Not yet.

A Seven Nation Army

You lock your door, prepare for a revelation, but sit instead with bubbles in your throat and question marks in your ears. This isn't the great insight you had been asking for. 

The world outside your door demands answers you cannot mold with your own two hands, the clay runs through your fingers like sand, you are afraid to take the first step because of all the others that demand to follow, this isn't the dream I was promised, America I have given you all and now I'm nothing. You used to believe the path would be found in poetry, but now you seem to have forgotten how to read. 

It occurs to me that I am America

 

I'm not sorry. 

Through the Days and

You lose your days and nights into lotus apathy, indifferent to the passing of time and the loss of your dreams. How long can you sit here paying rent without reaping the magic you were promised? There was a time I believed in the lightness of breath, a power in my step, a love in my words. I was so sure of it, and now I begin to question. Sometimes illness drags the life from my eyes, and each time I forget that I have been here before. I convince myself the days have been sunshine and daises up until this point and that now, somehow, I have lost it all. 

But the daffodils are sprouting along the Buttermilk Channel, this afternoon I went for a run along the East River and there's a manuscript on my desk that is getting better, we passed the equinox and you aren't dead yet. Something, something will come of this, your life isn't over yet. You are bleeding, yes, but scars can look like maps when they heal.