In stasis

And just when I thought I had made

myself old over wishing for

something to whisper

like a kind stranger into

my ear,

            I understand, and I do not

            blame you

I find myself catching the edge of

every movement of

atmosphere even the leaves

have forgotten.

Listening,

waiting...

Tomorrow and tomorrow

Diary entry, April 20, 2014

You think you know.  You can never know.  You will never know anything other than a name that means nothing to you.  You are trapped in the network.  The hallway has no exit.  The bicycle has no wheels.  If you step outside of the red lines there is nothing to stand on.  You will fall.  You will fall, and you will not even remember how to scream, but it won’t matter.  Because no one would hear you even if you did.  You are a story I sold for a million howls of laughter.  For a million screams of pleasure.  You are nothing.  You were just one more born to serve a purpose, and now you are used up.  No wonder you question living.  You know there is no purpose left for you.  I tore you into tiny pieces and gave bits to any who asked.  I did this because you are useless.  No one cared then, and no one cares now.  You are a piece of lint to be flicked away, blown into nowhere.

Legacy

I remembered watching from behind the door my mother sit on the edge of her bed, the shades pulled down and her body hunched over as if she had no strength to hold herself up, as she cried for the drunken husband who had disappeared once again.  It had taught me one thing:  make sure to close the door all of the way.  So only after I heard the door click shut did I sit on the edge of the bed, and cry for the husband who had forced me to leave him.

Refugee

Mother with child, 2015

Tell it how because of you I lie.
If I could reach between the slivers,
I would spread the dirt across my neck and
arms and cheeks and I
would muddy your triumph.
But I cannot tell yet what
you have done to me.
I must instead murmur little rivers of
fantasies,
rapturous babbling to submerge what we
know, what we fear of you, the dirt and I,
together we have silenced the shouting
angels with tar-pitched wings.

Because I know, 
you are victory and you are vicious murder.
What a strange game, I acknowledge these bruises
and tumors and tragedies as they
mock me through the
ravaged ends of
my hair.

Shadows

This is not how I meant it to be.
This is not who I meant to become.
These are not the memories I
expected to replay in my
head as I remembered who
I once had been.

Escape

Here in this leaving
triumph is fleeting
from so far away
no tongues left to speak in

Hiding

They found it, separately.  Sometimes one at a time, sometimes in small groups.  They all instinctively shied away from each other, accepted without argument that certain hallways would remain locked to them.  What did they want to see each other for, anyway?  They didn’t.  They didn’t, and they wouldn’t.

Once they had all arrived and found themselves their own shadowy corners, the teenage boy appeared.  He went to a courtyard in the middle, surrounded on all sides by brick walls with windows that opened from the inside.  On a white sheet spread out on the concrete ground he very deliberately started placing red plastic drinking straws.  No one watched him and he paid attention to no one else.

Over time the straws began to form an intricate pattern.  Those hiding in the brick building did not want to look at it, and when they did, they pretended not to understand.  Was it a formula, they asked?  The kind you needed to be a math genius to understand, perhaps?  They were not math geniuses, so they would never understand it.  Satisfied, they slid away from the windows. 

But the group of pirate boys living in the trees overhead did not leave.  They watched from the tree house they built high in the branches.  They knew what the red straws on the white sheet meant.  They knew it was a key.  A key to a map that would lead everyone in the building to the one place no one wanted to go. 

No one, that is, but them.