I want to be fleeting,
like the light between the tree tops
I’ll change
with each stroke of wind through the branches
No.
I want to be still,
quiet like the blue of twilight as it rests its veil
along the stones that line the shore
No.
I want to fly,
unstoppable and leaping,
the way that lightening glides its way
into the Earth

No,
no

no.

I want
only to be,
somewhere with you.
Rain falling,
eyes closed and
listening
to the thunder
beneath your skin

You taught me how to ride a bike,
you hoisted us onto your shoulders
so we could try to reach the fireworks in July,
and something in the way
you always had ice cream ready at the end of hot days
made it easy to look the other way

When you’d scream

When the anger would mold
your smile
into something swollen,
tongue scorching,
body molten
with glazed eyes
and a cracking, kiln blasted heart

It made it easy
the mornings after,
to sit in silence as you made pancakes
and not see the singed edges of the room,
or the flecks of ash that nestled
still smoking
in our hair

It made it hard,
when your words bloomed
into purple blossoms on our skin,
to see, even from a distance,
the brokenness lying all around us
in the wake of you

And the bruises that have faded
are not the ones that keep me up some nights.
It’s the charred, hardened pieces
baked deep
well beyond the reach of sight
that I fear may never heal

How odd it is
to teeter on the brink
of caring too much,
and not caring about anything at all

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