Grains of sand are falling down, speck by golden speck, leaving infinitesimally small scratches on this broken pane of glass. A million pieces shattered everywhere - no one to pick them up, to glue them back to solidarity. People will walk by and carry tiny shards away on the bottoms of their naked, padding soles. And will they pull them out? Or leave them bleeding and throbbing - let them burrow deeper and deeper until they themselves have absorbed that little piece of the looking glass? And does the answer even matter?

We live and die to be broken down, to pieces, composted, masticated, absorbed - picked apart bit by bit by those who want some parts of us, but not others. Picked apart bit by bit by insects that want some parts of us, but not others.

Not others.

the sky has shattered--
fairy tale stardust
and schrapnel--
all is painted yellow-red.

no, you say you're coping
but the truth is falling down
in fragments,
a little secret clinging to the back of each.
i want to wake you up.

make you feel
alive
make you feel
at all...

if i pry open your eyes
will i see white?
like nuclear divinity...
or will two empty,
unfeeling orbs
stare back at me?

sometimes,
while you are busy
(not living)
i tell you how much you deserve
not to be here.

You stand there, glorious,
like a Goddess of Destruction,
hair flowing around your porcelain face,
a moat of blood pooling at the shattered feet of your castle,
the gleam of victory in your shallow gaze
--and what have you won?

Metallic barriers rise and fall about you,
close about the corpses of those
unlucky souls
ill-fated enough to have had your favor for any short amount of time
--and I have to ask myself,
Are you really satisfied?

Are you content, in your solitude,
to have nothing to fear save the
(inevitable)
collapse of your own formidable defenses?

Once you said to me that you were glad to have loved,
to have felt as deeply as the darkest depths of the ocean,
to have felt
at all.
Once you said to me that you regretted nothing.

And now I behold you there,
beautiful and broken,
withdrawn from this world
--untouchable,

Unattainable--

and I have to wonder,
Was it really worth having loved at all?

Toxic _ 12.20.2009

Why

can you not 
see me?
I am standing,
here,
among your refuse...
clouded by your judgement--
drowning in the dark.
I am breathing you in--
you're toxic.
Waste.
Shame.
Fear.
Solitude.
Neglect.
A burden that
should not be 
mine.

How can I tell you
that I love you?
When all I want
and all I need
is to leave you
here
alone...
because you have captured my flow--
bottled my essence,
broken me
with your troubles.

So tell me
Why
can you not 
see me?
Shrinking
beneath your weight
and your disease,
after all this time...

Or has your sickness blinded you as well?

You are toxic.
And I need 
to be let go.

Adaptation

It's cold here,
in my pseudo-skin.
I hear the walls cracking,
crumbling away;
the hands of the clock smashing,
shattering glass;
white noise crashing down like a waterfall,
tossing about pieces of the wreckage at the bottom
with nonchalance.
I feel wave after wave roll in,
hastey and impatient:
I'm waiting to become one of them.
With my eyes glazed over,
facial features askew in a grotesque arrangement...
the left limb telling the right not to look,
the head telling the lungs they're not drowning...
They're not drowning...
and in the event that they are, indeed, drowning
and in the event that they are, indeed, on their last leg
and in the event that they are, indeed, out of breath,
tired, suffocating, collapsing, struggling to survive...
and in the event that they are, indeed, drowning,
the head will tell the gasping lungs not to fret,
not to panic,
it's all in the head.

ghost child

sometimes i miss it--
waking up to see you standing there in my room,
surrounded by the darkness,
your hair golden-white,
snowflakes frozen on your eyelashes,
...smile frozen to your face,
a frosty heat permeating from your body...
like cold breath on a winter day.
sometimes i miss that girl...
the way she used to haunt me,
lure me back to whence i came...
but most of the time,
(no point in lying)
i don't.

To call her my own

Brown—I sink back into this Earth that gave life to me,
surrounded by moist soil and roots trailing off from green
_to yellow to white as they
_stretch their dirty fingers down,
_down to the depths of their nourishment.
I do not claim to know much about this Earth I call
_my Mother, my Home, my Resting Place,
But I do know that she comforts me:
_I hear her sighs in the Rivers and Streams that
_flow in a melodic symphony from here
_to only She knows where.
I feel her footsteps like a drum in my chest as I go
_racing through these forests of time and no matter
_what day, what hour, what minute it is—
_no matter what face I happen to be wearing—
She welcomes me,
spilling endless amounts of warmth from her own fiery,
_molten core
into mine.
She glistens with the eternal youth and fertility of
_a thousand mothers,
_a thousand fathers,
_a thousand lovers,
So that I may allow that same verdant fertility to absorb any troubles
_I may have brought with me.
Brown—I sink back into this Earth that gave life to me in an array
_of her most brilliant colors…
_and I do not have the Audacity
_to call her my own.