Posts tagged prose

There was never a day I wanted out. It was always a night. When you’d go and do things like tell your friends we were married, Tiny, trite, American Dream that you have, You made me hope that I was worth such a thing, The glamour of your smile keeping me idle twenty hours more, Our frayed hearts glued together at the edges like paper mache eggshells.

And then there was the way you made me dust my smile off, Teeth splitting out my lips, bright as daybreak, like I never forgot it on the days I was up to my neck with loneliness. I should have told you, when I first said “forever” that I’d given up your God like a heroin habit years before and “recovering” is the only thing I’ll always be.

What I have of you now is a dig site. The bones of us. Naked and gleaming beneath a summer sun, Scattered so badly no archaeologist will ever assemble me apart from you, We’ll always have a few of our ribs exchanged on the display at the natural history museum and I choke on that when the minutes drag.

I had a heart to heart with “Promise” and I swore I wouldn’t make any, But my momma always said I was a lying bastard and both those things are true, You can imagine how much it hurt to make good on that insult when I packed up your things after that last time you fucked me. Couldn’t make love any more, I forgot it, left it in the hospital with my childhood and my mercy, but I rolled out in a wheelchair with a backbone I’d never had before.

Listen, breaking your heart was always at the bottom of my To-Do list but there’s only so many things I can do to kill the hours in a lifetime and I entombed too many days in the mausoleum of your expectations. But I need you to know, in a shallow attempt to repair the bridge I burned between us I did show up to your church on that last Sunday. You were already blowing the youth leader and I remembered why I let you go.

There is a point where breaking things doesn’t quell your fury anymore. This howling rage has broken my vocal chords. I hate you so much some days that I consider killing myself and addressing the suicide note to you just to guarantee I’d finally have the last word. That’d show ya.

The note would read: K.D.H. ! I know your daddy didn’t raise you to be Judas Iscariot. No one ever called you a lying bastard and you were neither, So I couldn’t believe it when you didn’t fight to keep us together. The words “always” and “forever” wore away my tarnish and sweetened up my sour, and I still can’t purge you from that dark spot behind my dreams. So now I’m eating razorcake and spitting up the happily never after, You called me sunshine but I was a sundial, worthless without your light. Goodbye.

We all deserve absolution. But especially the Godless who choose the way of peace and kindness without promise of reward or repercussion. I’m here to tell you; in a world where science tells us what, where, why, how, and to what extent, Love is the last great mystery, the final frontier, the deep and wild wilderness, Worth every moment.

The human back is made for breaking. But keep cool, glaciers, bone may be entirely too fragile a material from which to craft the spine that holds us mountains up, but somehow our Fathers never found iron for our creation; they never learned to temper steel in the forges of our hearts, But we are not forced to break apart.

The stress fractures of life have been making puzzle pieces of us all even though we began it fused together at the ends of our fingers like fossils in the ancient dust. Every day we invent a geology with scopes obscured enough to make it okay to look at one another’s eyes again. It’s Everest lonely and Arctic cold, So let’s hug each other in the dark, warm and dirty, made of earth and water, just like me, it doesn’t matter here that we can’t look our shame in the eyes anymore; these lights are out. There was never an Edison in the emotion of our existence.

The human back is made for breaking, but we are not lonely mountains thrust up to hold the sky over each other’s heads. These valleys between us are not half as deep as our burdens are heavy and there are shoulders enough for all of us in these peaks. Promise you’ll never be too proud to ask for help. Let us not be bowed by anything less than the tectonic plates, keep cool, glaciers, one cannot carry these worlds alone.

But we’re never alone. We mountains have roots; let’s trace them. We can find excuses to be brothers and sisters so we don’t have to suffer under the yoke of a solitary survival any longer, Bind up the splinters of your brittle back with sincere apologies and kind words. Cast down the walls we’ve built around our hearts, they’re full of holes we don’t notice till it’s dark, and they’re blowing us apart.

The enduring power of the human spirit has been straining beneath the continental drift twenty hours a day since the invention of time and we still can’t afford the lease on contentment. Let’s not treat each other like molehills in the hour of our mountain; keep cool, glaciers, we’re only a range together. We are not lonely mountains thrust up to hold the sky over each other’s heads. These valleys between us are not half as deep as our burdens are heavy and the human back is made for breaking. Hand in hand, fused back together like fossils in the ancient dust, we’ll forge tomorrows in the forges of our earthen hearts; we are not forced to break apart.

The Listener told me we only have what we remember. But I was always the speaker.

The sins of my fathers paid dividends in silver tongues, not ears, I’ve got a shoulder to cry on but it’s cold as a frozen lake, and beneathe that water for walking on, there’s a loss like a river- it keeps flowing. I continue to reach for things that aren’t there, like some prankster placed razorblades around this blind man’s house, I’ve cut each of these fingers to the bone grasping for my memories like they were astro-glide kite strings, Time taught me that letting go means giving up and those things you drop may just never come back to you.

We only have what we remember. But my memory has been slippery as a fish in water, deceptive at best, obvious as the needlestack had no hay, I jumped out the barn loft on to it anyway, but at least it taught me what it meant to bleed for the first time. I’m learning so much for the first time, I can no longer ride a bicycle and I already had smile lines when I learned to walk, but I’d still give my knees to recall what it was like to love someone.

Ive got 13 keys on my keyring. Because every house I’ve lived in becomes a home, and even though fate has changed the locks themselves, These chips of brass remind me there has always been a place to lay my head. If I ever forget that, well, trumpets, too, are made of brass, and I’ll give you all these shadows of homesteads and hope you can craft me a clarion call.

The wizard made the Tinman a heart, can’t I make my stoneheart a brain? I can build it better than before. Construct it from ‘your’ broken guitar strings. Glue it together with ‘your’ tears of grief,Cover it with ‘your’ picked scabs and scar tissue, Paint it with all the blood anyone ever bled on purpose, and when I’ve got all these pieces of everyone hung up in my thrift shop skull their discarded compassion will cover up my sawbones survival scars and I will finally know what a yesterday feels like.

The human back is made for breaking. Bone is entirely too fragile a material from which to craft the spine that holds us up but somehow our Fathers never learned to mine iron from infinite possibility or temper steel in the forges of our hearts. We are not made for breaking apart.

Life’s an experiement in making puzzle pieces of us all when we began it stitched together with our hands and heartstrings. We’re inventing a geology with scopes obscurred enough to make it okay to look at one another’s eyes again. Let’s hug strangers in the dark, we can’t look our shame in the eyes anymore; these lights are out. There was never an Edison in the emotion of existence.

We are not lonely mountains thrust up to hold the sky over each other’s heads. These valleys between us are not half so deep as our burdens are heavy and there are shoulders enough for all of us in these peaks. Promise you’ll never be too proud to ask for help. Let us not be bowed by anything less than the tectonic plates shifting beneath our feet, not in our arms or on our shoulders, one cannot carry these worlds alone.

We’re never alone. We mountains have roots; let’s trace them. We can find excuses to be brothers and sisters so we don’t have to suffer under the yoke of a solitary survival any longer, Bind up the splinters of our brittle backs with lent hands and kind words. Cast down the walls We all build around our hearts, they’re full of holes that we don’t notice till it’s dark, until they’re blowing us apart.

The enduring power of the human spirit has been straining beneath the continental drift twenty hours a day since the invention of time and we still can’t afford the lease on contentment. Let’s not treat eachother like molehills in the hour of our mountain; keep cool, glaciers, let’s range together.

We are not lonely mountains thrust up to hold the sky over each other’s heads. These valleys between us are not half so deep as our burdens are heavy and the human back is made for breaking. We’ll forge tomorrows with the bellows of our earthen hearts, we are not made for breaking apart

I decided today that I could not believe in outer space. 
That I could not believe in the stars, or the sky itself, 
That I could not believe in the clouds, seemingly so close,
Because that would draw my thoughts, so very far, from
you.