Relit

Our lives have been lived,
bodies changed,
candles burned and relit,
thoughts formed in cycles,
seasons,
snow ball fights and rivers swam,
fields found and favorite shirts worn thin,
forgetting so much, a compendium of words.
This place is a shelter, an opening
in what was walked away from.
Five year old emails
to grandparents that no longer live.
Six year old emails
to the girl who changed the life
you had.
Letters and notes, pictures,
paintings, poems,
parts of parts
of parts.
Sweaters lost beneath the bed,
shoes destroyed in forests of
fondness,
rocks skipped across ten thousand
miles of memories, getting smaller,
gaining distance,
slowly sinking
beneath the surface
of lives lived.
Broken bones, fractured hopes,
torn between doing and done,
moving on or moving in.
Poems are plaster casts of
the intangible beauty
existing beyond our
ability to truly share
the feeling of
"alive."
We're bound in them,
and deleted,
torn, trashed, tossed,
dismissed, dismantled,
edited, repurposed,
disposed,
and found.
We're bound in
lives lived,
binding in us
life of others
changed and
relit.

Natural Selection

Calculated.

Most of it is anyway,

after that moment of discovery

what some people call a first breath,

and others suppose it's the beginning of life

but the rest of us haven't been convinced yet

that we aren't really living amongst our own murderous

tendencies.

DOB, timed, stamped, and registered,

most of it is anyway,

and after that it gets really weird,

I mean,

it gets weird in this sort of

"out there in the world"

kind of way,

you were once apart of something,

now it's numbers, ideas of being, ideas of not being,

and actually not being.

But now it's mostly unexplainable,

bubbles in bubbles exploding reabsorption,

disintegrating reconstruction, like

the kind that weighs on you late at night

when enough wasn't enough and it's all

hidden away somewhere in that small

shirt pocket, right in front of everyone's

eyes, but you're a great distraction, maybe

the greatest one you'll ever be able to

present to the world, a card trick.

It'll be that way, we'll all be that way 

for each other, card tricks, shuffling ourselves

into new decks of disappearing acts,

blowing away in the wind.

It's mostly unexplainable because

it's mostly uncontainable, forgetting

diverging, selecting for and against

worth or unworth. 

The environment creates and 

destroys you.

What started / ended it

What started / ended it

Lapses & Threads

Sometimes we have these short lapses in the presence of our own presence, moments when we see the future, feel a person that we will love, who we have not met yet. We experience our own experiences prior to their realization, their moment of contact in our propulsion through time. Moments when we experience a life that is not ours but will be if we stay right here, always right here. These short lapses feel like pouring honey onto your tongue and discovering it again for the first time, waking up at four in the morning and seeing their face folded into a pillow, covered in moonlight and shadows, and our eyes feel reborn, like blown glass taking shape and cooling, like clouds creating thunder in the same way for millions of years. Rocks becoming smooth. Finally smooth.

After so many nights of moonlight and crashing thunder, these short lapses are our fingers wrapped too tightly with unbreakable thread. A thread that leaves marks, lines, cuts, and hope. We pull the threads farther apart, and reveal, and entangle, and soon the threads slice so deeply into our flesh, and become taught, waiting, praying for them to give, to snap, to fail, to open to us. And soon they weave patterns through us, into our bones, into our fears for what the future holds. Soon the threads hold us together, our skin gives way and the air that kept distance from the moon now keeps us from ourselves, still pulling, tearing, fighting against the threads. They're red. Thin. Sharp. Beautiful. Kind. They are tied in knots to our limbs and movements, moments. Our blood vessels are tiny eyes of tiny needles for tiny threads, weaving through our bodies, mapping, coiling, weaving, binding, we breathe them. We are threads, and others fight to open us, we're a lapse for someone in something and they can't pull us apart to see inside and soon we're tangled, and coiled, and chained on the floor, unspooled, unraveled, torn, sewn, complete.