When I Think On 18, And The Years That Have Passed Since Then, I Realize How Many Little Deaths I’ve

One day I’ll be old, and teenagers will record me doing mundane tasks with my wife in public, and post it somewhere, on an app with a name I don’t know, appreciating #humans being humans. Appreciating how adorable old people are like we’re rabbits in a wooded glade or something, never thinking they’ll be me, holding the hand of their partner, helping her step from the street to the sidewalk with weary bones and wrinkled faces. One day I was them, and one day they will be me. Though I’ll never know their names or faces, they will have taken a moment of my life as their own as a relic of humanity, though for me, it is just a slice of my morning commute. I wonder if I’ll feel the camera on my back then. I wonder if I’ll wish I was the recorder and not the recorded. I wonder how many likes the essence of my self and my life would get, as a moment of my life is turned into an online commodity by a stranger.

Create as you would breath, constantly, to live and not to impress. It’s there in your vital honesty you’ll find what it is you’re seeking, there sitting softly in your calloused hands.

In twilight hours, when her day’s thoughts drift heavenly with the receding tide, and fears and doubts rescind, she thinks of her. Her head wet from the sea dampening her pant legs, resting in her lap as a black pearl. She runs her fingers through her short black hair and wonders how it rises underwater, if she could ever see it for herself without drowning. Salt and iron prick her nose. The siren opens her eyes and the moment she looks at her with a tenderness so palpable, her image disappears. Her lap lay empty. The sailor girl’s mind too shy to peer at even the idea of her so flagrantly. She hears the creaking of the floor boards, and inhales the lantern oil burning, and is brought back to dry reality. Skin itching for the sand in the ocean shallow.

Would you burn the olive trees if you grew them, if you felt their bark wind under your fingertips like locks of hair? Would you poison the water if it quenched your thirst, if you let the river stones touch your sole? You claim the land is yours, and you’re owed every grain of its sand but someone who loves the land would not demolish its beauty so recklessly. If that is how you treat what is yours, I dread the fate of those you call others.

I seldom love those I admire. What is there to hold in the greats? Achievement sits on the shelf while a lover rests under my bed covers, I cannot converse with trophies though their gold sheens are beautiful, they are empty things. I need a mess, I need something to fill my aching hands so full I could never hope to grasp it all. Keep me busy, keep me warm. That is all I ask of the one I love.

Splinter my dream into a web of cracks and gaps.

Take what little splash of anticipation I have pestering my rancorous mind and freeze it, immobilize me.

Take me where you want to go.

I was his worry stone.

he couldn’t pick my face out of a crowd,

Or name a single interest of mine;

he couldn’t bother to wash his mug in the sink,

Or put the coffee on in the first place;

he couldn’t braid my hair while he spoke,

Or untangle the nest he made.

All he could do was rub his hands together,

And wonder where I’d gone,

after eroding me away.

I am a mimic that sacrifices her true face to embody others, and I fool everyone but myself.

Building empires on falling sand, when we sink it is by design. Pinnacles dull, golden eras dust as they live on in old men’s memory and no where else.

His tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth, in love with the way his own ideas tasted.