mum would worry,
it’s what she did best
next to loving like the world was ending
as she would look to me and say –

“why do you write your pain
with quill-dipped black tears
scraped across the page of your face
leaving scars that make me cry?”

and i would respond in quiet words –

“some songs are supposed to hurt –
they ring out best from broken bell towers
as shrill notes escaping like pied pipers
leading haunted child-pain poison
leeched from a heavy, leaden, bitten body
leaving an empty husk ready to be filled
with an embracing kind of lighter life.”

mum would smile soft in sadness –

“i see the beauty in your need
but it still makes me want to sob in silence
knowing that hurt heals your hurt
and that sometimes a bone must be broken
to mend in a straighter, stronger way.”

poets bleed music
as waters to the dead dry earth
bringing bright and verdant new life
food to a starving world

this is why

we are lined up against the wall
and shot in the noon day sun
so that in our deaths
others may find life

pain falls with night
as a great and coal-pitch crow
perched within the pine tree tops
witness in the middle of it all,
an abiding wing-spread vantage
looming over the lands we created
being black as an absence in the sky

and we, we lie awake and listen to its raw cry
this joke of a songbird with tearless, obsidian eye

while somewhere not so far away
hope chatters with dawn-filled voices
dancing bright behind the wind;
a morning song of starlings
marshaled in a hidden chorus
preparing to chase away the dark,
as heralds of this new rising sun

for there is an end to every evening…

cut

just a quick
slicing motion
to separate
a one
from another

a terrible
a powerful
a vengeful

act of will
to end a once begun,
to finish a now undone

cut

i can cut it all away
in a cold,
in an unfeeling way
store it in a buried box
to be disintered another day
and placed on a shelf
strange ossuary
built for the bones
of the formerly alive
now stored like abandoned files
without a kiss to revive

births and deaths
and i in between
writing notes in the margins
falling, flailing, desperately dancing
and singing through the screams
of a life wanted though unwilled.

sometimes the best I can do
is breathe in the quiet dark
keeping time to its passage –
and it is just I in between
the lost beginning
and the inevitable end
sightless to it all

there you are
always a shimmer
shining in my peripheral
a beautiful movement
flowing as flames
dancing in a gentle breeze

there you are
always whispering love,
a balm that heals,
hiding my scars
making me wonder
if perhaps I died
and woke to this warm forever
immersed in you.