There is a hesitation in seeing a dream to fruition,
its flesh rendered and made living.
Susceptible now
to the harshness reality imposes
where it was once unmarred and beautiful,
in your head

It must weather real storms
and unseen shoals
to become real—
each tear through the hull can
not be enough
to sink it.

It must prevail through the
depths of failure,
through every whisper of your
own maddened mind
pleading you, to stop.

And though your imagination
will lend wave after wave
of all the disastrous ways in which
it may become dead in the water,
never to rise again

you must set sail anyway

Perhaps in my pursuit of objectivity,
of the perspective of an outside observer,
I became too removed from myself.

Detached
from this singular experience that is my life
that is my mind made flesh,
and increasingly focused on the bigger picture outside of it.
The one that goes on without me,
without any of us

It is a pathway of thinking I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to steer away from

It may seem a silly thing to be reminded,
but if you haven’t told them
odds are
they don’t know

There is a burning beneath my ribs,
a hunger like the world’s run out of air
and your lips
might exhale
the last bit of oxygen on this Earth

I feel like there’s something important that I’m supposed to do or some place I’m supposed to go, but I’ve fallen off and now,
I’ve forgotten what it was.
I’m watching as time falls away beneath me with increasing speed.
My days are filled with a job I love and people I love and hobbies I love,
but something feels wrong or out of place, or missing,
and I can’t figure out what it is.

Maybe everyone feels that way

The kindest thing we can do for our children
is to heal. To be happy in our own being.
Not the kind of happy that is a mask
we remove at night
as we settle beneath the covers to sleep,
but the kind that takes root in our lips
and blossoms as something living in our skin.
Love for yourself that can be felt across the room
as you smile into it, onto others

Kids can feel our uncertainty,
our pain, our dissatisfaction, our anger,
when our smile is there
but there’s a shadow behind it,
pulling at us where we think no one else can see

Because like the white curve of your rib
or the slender slope from your wrist
to the cup of your palm,
they were once a physical part of you.
And though they have broken away
that connection remains;
it is impossible
to hide the truth of your heart from them.
They feel the ache in its beating,
deep in their bones
that look just like yours,
they know.
And it makes them inherently untrusting of the world.

You, the benchmark,
the earliest glimpse they have into what lies ahead
on this winding road we are all on
and when they look at you,
will they know that it’s worth it?

You, the most impenetrable force on this Earth
that at one time could lift the sheets
at the foot of the bed
and slay
all manner of horrors lurking there.
In their eyes, what could break you?
What hands hide in that darkness,
waiting and twisted
to drag them, too, into the black.
Will they retain in their own cupped palms
that glowing happiness of youth,
or will this world drain it,
drop
by drop,
until they too
become haunted

These and hundreds of other wordless questions
will linger like ghosts,
drifting amid the caverns of their subconscious,
doubtful and weighted and gnawing
for years before they ever realize they’re there.

Some of us never do