Take your hands off my philosophy

What do you care if I cannot fall in love with myself anymore?

What can it be to you how alone a human stands when her life transits to Mars? 

When all turns red as a tomato on the shelf where it freezes, where the skin thins to tissue

As the center hardens to rock?

What did I care that your life has turned into a radio

Broadcasting 24/7, unheard in a tin room?

I may never have been what you think I was

That good little Catholic kid from New York Avenue

Growing up in a town as far from New York as geography can take you

What about that skinny kid

A macaroni child with a lazy eye

Uncomfortable with focus, never knowing where to look?

Wearing Buster Browns with corded laces

A blue serge uniform covering bony knees

Chapped lips, always in reach of a book about horses?

Listening to life like a mouse for a cat’s paw

Watching for light not of rods and cones shifting

But divinity descending.

—

I can take my heart & bang it on a table now. No harm. No foul.

No burning houses with smoking windows to toss it through

It wouldn’t blaze anymore, having become ironwood & char

Unfeeling, unemotional, squeezed out with a rasp.

No matter. I was likely never who I thought I was, yeh?

I brought the best of me to the altar for sacrifice

After the light in the room changed

I found all was turned inside out

And there was nothing inside to pull from

No strength, no love, no shy violet water.

So I can toss it around, a medicine heart

Too heavy to play, too common to breathe

Too full to give away

Too empty to love.

Let’s find something else to do, okay?

Let’s find an afternoon we don’t have to pay for with blood

With dis-chord, let’s paint this Room of the

Unknown Soulmate some other color.

I’m so tired of empty.

—

Pray me into life: let the sunset squire me to beauty

Unbeknownst to others

Visited by my jaded eyes

Blurred with reading-tears

Coffee cup of empty

Guilt & sorrow my two most constant companions

A new lightbulb in a house afraid of an electric bill

I am naked as an undressed manikin

Featureless as unformed clay

Full of metaphor & simile, meta-for & similar

In the land of the unique.

Yesterday at this time, I was laughing.

—

Back when I felt important in the world

When I felt like someone wanted me to smile

Like it would be a devastation should I not

Back before the world chained the angel in me

To words I decorate with a pen

Too much cliché does a body no good

I know this is an unoriginal thought

But must voice it, nonetheless.

There was never anyone who loved me but God

And God has to love everybody, just because.

Just sayin’

—

Listen to me! The broad devourer of having no past

Of never believing much while convinced of it all!

I can wear my shoes on the couch now

No one corrects me.

I can avow a sunset for its beauty

While whispering of dawn to come.

What would I give to not be lonely

To be out of this moment where all feels “emptified”?

Where would I walk were I following my heart?

The dream a wish created vanishes with the color from a sky

I have closed my blinds against.

It is so much safer in the dark.

—

These words run out ahead, a parallel track

I huffnpuff along, steam rising from my head

Looking down for pennies on the track.

I would not see the angel until I walked into his robes

Nor feel him until the wings wrapt ‘round

Not know of my sorrow til he gave me a handkerchief

I want no direction without holding that leading hand

A little cold from flying…a little coarse from picking off sins

But landed in time to unfold me from my fear,

Scraping with a pearl fingernail at these old scars

Bleeding into tomorrow, staining the day.

The wound clears &, clean, I find a ring of bright new hope

To dance within.

—

So this is my talent: to wring words from rocks sun-dry & dusty

This world I strive to escape by pulling on a cloak of poetry

Hand-woven, soft & muted of dove-grey

Swirling around the rainsoft boots

I have kicked my life down the road

Now I need to go looking for it again.

—