The Heart, The Mind
Often, these two will have tea together.
Turning in the sun, devouring fields of bluegrass.
I won’t lie sometimes you will be the bluegrass,
plucked with brute force and
poised at the mouth of a god.
Often, you will be swallowed.
And only in your unmaking will you be
so sweet
so
light.
Crates
Each day, you will set out to collect
grudges to hold against the world,
then lug laboriously through dusk.
You will think to protect yourself
against every ailment besides
silence, which will seep through the field of
your mind like gasoline.
You will label thousands of crates and tuck them under your synapses,
thinking they are utterly whole.
You will never be able to revel in a happiness
infected with a tinge of melancholy,
The dusted labels now
reading more like prayers than testaments to the contents inside.
You will long for anything truly even, rind and all.
You will long for a longing truly even, rind and all.
You will long for a haze so thick it could
estrange you from your
own hands.
The words following “I am—” will hold your throat hostage.
They will hold a timeless possibility
That will be shattered by “—a pig,” or worse,
nothing at all.
We Shared Only This Earth
They had been two forces present at the dawning of
my life, so naturally,
I took them to be extensions of my life, sentient beings
that came simply with the house,
always at arm’s length.
In the later years, even as my
arms grew gaunt, they could not
equip the new space between the three of us.
The first farewell
posed the most detriment to
the fickle heart squirming in the fickle body. Slowly, the apartness
accumulated enough to barricade
the tears, reduced to a shifting sheen in the eyes. The Going sipped the
inevitability out of Staying‘s palms.
The only thing we shared, the Earth, most literally. On a day
deep in summer’s pit, I truly didn’t
need them. The starkness of it hinted at a Before, but their rooms,
indistinguishable from the others,
hinted otherwise. Longing was a locket, long lost, vanished like the dead do.
It was so odd, I’ll tell you. Her eyes
surveilled mine, yes, and her mouth distorted into the shape of words, directed at
me. Two metres away, too close to be
a vision filling her absence- she was certainly there, though my mind took
her to be half a world away,
still.
All My Selves—
—coalesce to get
a good night’s sleep.
And how unfortunate,
this brotherhood in the night,
when everything looks one
and uniform anyway.
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