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2.12.2017
Fire
You said that
you were suicidal,
you said
you think about it once a week and it terrifies
you, not like the ground where lightning strikes more like the thunder that surrounds
you, like being caught in a cave system without a headlamp,
you're trying to feel
your way out, the ridges of stone on
your fingers, but there's nothing to feel,
no sound, no direction except the way your breath
moves, like echolocation without reverberations coming back. And
I am meant to be the torch, but
I’m caught up in my own dark space, the hidey-hole in the bed that
I barely fit in but it held
me at arms length from the clenched fists and manic eyes, and
I'm not sure
I'm courageous enough to reach out to touch you, to find your hand, because
I'm afraid
we are both heading further underground so maybe
it's better not to move, still like
the silence of snow fall,
covering the earth like phoenix ash, just wishing
that we too would burn,
because sitting in this dark is just fading away
like crickets into rain
and beneath the tin roof there’s no way
you can see through all the white noise, the TV screen migraine that fills
your senses, and the same sparks of light that burst when
you hold your eyes shut are the constellations, the neurons
tracing the outline, each flash the symbol crash
of synapses snapping back, leaving breadcrumbs to tell
the vague remnants of a story,
they don’t fall just fade until
they’re a blaze in the nebula,
reminiscent of the same little pills, the dopamine thrill that
you hate that you need, but in order to grow planting seeds
you have to tend to them every day. And some days
it’s just too hard to pull every weed, or leave
your room, or get out of bed, so
you sit here, waiting for someone else to move you,
stubborn like gravity pulling at a feather, and
you fall so slowly,
you fall so slowly.
I can see it the final moments
I can almost read your thoughts like they’ve been posted on a tele-prompt and
you fall so slowly. For a moment it looks as if
you can fly, but gravity is no friend to mercy,
your bones are not as hallow as
you believe them to be when
you say, “I feel empty inside”, see even birds
have to force their wings to fly, and
I just want to catch you.
Rewind you like old movies, not in order to return you, but so
I could re-watch every single moment that led
you to this moment, and wondering if all of
these paths are leading toward the same conclusion, a detective’s display board
with thousands of strings all leading to the same picture, a scene
I’ve lived with you time and time again, but when
I finally reached out of that darkness into
your darkness and placed my hand on
your shoulder
you shrugged it away without a single word, it was
almost as if reality itself faded away in that
one simple act as if
I had just awoken from a dream where
I was you and
we were falling so slowly through the darkness
together until the ground came up to meet
us and I shuddered awake to find that
we had never left the ground in the first place.
If anything we were trapped in opposite sides of fun-house mirrors and
our own reflection had us lost,
we no longer recognized the dull iris caved in like shadows
with streaks of lightening fire racing out from the center,
our souls trying to escape sleep, endlessly reaching
to gain just one more minute of life but failing in every attempt
because you can’t steal back the moments,
no we are simply time-traveling in one direction
toward that Sylvia Plath kind of existential math
that always ends the same.
I think I lost how to support you in my own shame.
And I think that sometimes shame makes us cowards.
And I am a coward.
But I will not leave you in this darkness, even if it takes the last wet match,
I will find a way to make it burn, and that may
only be enough for a spark, but
that’s all you need for fire.
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