I Was Told I Needed To Learn To Sit With My Grief. To Hold Its Hand And Mother It. To Allow It To Exist

Your past is no excuse for your future

Everything about you scares me; I guess that's why I'm here.

What I wouldnt give to feel the static in my limbs again.

For as much as it makes me jump and twitch at least I can move.

For as distracting as my restlessness is at least I am not still.

Not frozen by the empty space between my skin and my bones.

Left hollow by the absence of motivation; Of want for anything.

Here among the stars and brine

The souls sing and weep

Trying not in vain to lure a sailor from his sleep

They call it seduction, heavy and sweet

But is it a trap if they give you that for which your heart beats?

When you grow up a certain way, you may know what the cat feels when it shies from your hand

There are hands on my hips and I dread where they might go; cold and calloused and full of intent.

They inch up instead along my ribs; crawling and scraping against my skin.

Under my sternum they begin to dig; slicing deep with sharpened nails.

They stab and burrow deep in my chest; hands pressed in prayer barely brush my heart.

They snap my bones when they pull apart; prying me open to hungry eyes.

Yet still, I beat for their entertainment; exposed and bleeding and no longer me.

I can only scream my feelings through the open window of a moving car

When the wind steals the words from my lips and smothers them before they can be heard

The grass is greener somewhere ahead. But half the time I'm walking backwards.

Greedy are the trees

"Haven't you ever seen it?" She asked me.

"Gnarled roots pale as bone crawling their way through the underbrush. Pushing aside new green ferns and beds of decaying leaves. Each root peaking for long lengths from the damp dirt. Anchored maybe by the earth or maybe by thorny vines, sharp and thick with red-tipped spines. This is the work of the trees." She whispers this all to me in a conspiring way.

"You'll see them reaching with knothole fists towards the waters edge. Thirsty for what the spring has to offer; as if the ground isn't soft with it already." She pauses smile turned sharp and condescending in the way a mother's does when sharing stories of her child's mischief.

"Greedy things"

Everyday I get older and I understand the world a little better. And yet I never have any more control over it. Any more effect on it.

I am only biding my time. Getting older. Understanding more.

Eventually, I'll have to do something about it.