One hand claps

I've been playing around more with narrative poetry lately. Part of me always pulls back to the abstract and maybe that will always be my specific gravity. But its been helpful to write a little more stream of consciousness and to focus on the rhythm of the language more than the density. I think breaking them up after the fact has been a fun way of finding things in the writing I didn't catch the first time through. That being said this one really ought to be performed I think, but hopefully it still flows well from the page.

You’re wrong you know.

Of course you don’t, I say that line rhetorical.

I was always the one with dancing words and you were the rhythm they moved to.

Still,

whatever I might lose in framing doesn’t kill my point.

We weren’t meant to sing in solo.

In a perfect world,

or better,

you’d have realized I had always been your ocean and your sky.

That even if all the world had burned you

that I would love you without pause.

I was the dreamer, horizon

the one who saw the course,

made sure that your soul found space to stretch her wings, and depths to soothe her aches. There was nothing in your cosmos that I wasn’t meant to hold

In a perfect world,

or better yet a world with me and you.

You would have seen how pride

and agony

were the very things that held

you

back.

The price of admission, if you will.

And you’d have left them at the door with all the rest of the garbage

that we’d pocketed along the way.

See you,

you were the solid warm nature.

The gravity that kept me here, reminded me of living.

An endless source of wonders,

each a color and a taste.

Every day

a new flower,

a new vista,

and ever changing wonder and kaleidoscope of change. In a better world

I’d have realized just how much I craved embrace,

and how that calling was my spirit finding reflection in your face.

But that meant courage.

That meant choice.

And that meant letting myself be,

rather than just a mental exercise

or

some platonic form of me.

Myself,

if I will

Guess I didn't.

If I was better, I’d have loved you in the place that you had made.

Instead of waiting,

ghostly coward

with my shadows and my cave.

if, or better yet, we would have grown without the wounds

In the story it was Zeus,

in jealousy and fear that cut our body into ribbons and left us wandering the plain.

But where’s the thunder?

Where’s the lightning?

I think we did this one ourselves.

But even so,

that doesn’t make it easier to swallow.

You’ve found your sad reflecting pool and can’t look up at all or hear my fading voice repeating words

you can’t recall.

We were supposed to be two.

Halves of the whole that made the music work.

I was the writing and you were the page.

The left and the right, the head and the heart,

the up-shot rush of the swing as it strained to reach the starry blasted sky, and the pull,

of mother earth calling the body back before our dinner got cold.

Both attended by the thundering applause of the cool night air rushing breathless in the ears.

But the truth,

was always in that moment of weightless

reckless

wonder

where nothing but everything could fill you up to bursting,

and I

could pluck the strings of god.

I glanced down too late,

I think,

cascading wild my windmill limbs seeking anything to hold to as I rocketed toward sky.

My own strength

loosed,

and uselessly unmet.

adrift as rarified air wrapped me gently in its ever cooling hem

I dreamed a star to guide me home.

A light

to paint the way Odysseus would sail.

My beating heart come back to claim its soul.

Each season turns despite

My twilights twist treacherous, now.

When the brush still paints the edges of my world in dreams

I cannot help but try to color in the spaces that you aren’t.

I can’t recall which lights were real and which were beacons I left weeping long ago.

A spirit cannot beat a heart,

but what was I to do but die a ghost

and so I cut myself in two and dreamed your space into its dust,

at odds

and even as I fail to do

what I was made to love.

I can still hear the wind,

you know.

The soaring cheer that used to thunder through my ears has not gone silent, though I think, it may have lonelied

through the years.

Somewhere I must have held my breath and taken it into my breast

cause I can feel it,

yearning ceaselessly to breathe it out.

And I will try.

To whisper logos into flesh and life

your magic, your part

there's so little of me here.

It works me like a bellows,

from time to time it takes me in my gut and beats my chest until I’m sobbing hyperventilating

on the floor of my room

but I persist.

Because a dream cannot awake itself

as even half heart I cannot cease to sing.