love’s bubbled illusion cocooned me.
its final kiss waved me tumbling away,
to the far place from whence I had come.
no boat to carry me there in the storm,
only the wreckage of what had been left,
to break upon these familiar old shores.
i, shrunken beyond presence and tightened.
not will enough even to whisper ‘fuck it all,’
i cried deeply at the loss of my significance.
my own dead star now, blinking time’s beams.
this once lighthouse, empty of most everything,
save dire necessity and warm gravel. breakfast.
curlewing the sonorous grief of a story of me,
i spilled deep fruity casked blood from the soul,
gifting it all, as more than a share to the Angels.
wisdom can bring with it a scarring, aged visage.
bones that know how to tremble in the fearing.
a vulnerable heartbreak, rib-caged shatterings.
i am the void.
gone.
i have seen enough to know that now.
redemption is a taut poem unimagined,
retched ink tattoo, scraped from insides.
howl.
cracks at the beginnings, slip in the seeds.
endings now in plain sight. visceral.
unfurling is a back-breaking curve of the spirit.
dying persona dissolving into soils of before.
ancestral breath breaching my skeletal veil,
piercing the sound of silence with a keening.
this dissembling is bigger than I can think upon.
the pressure build up in my psyche finds no release.
i cannot let it go because there is no longer any i.
grasping words from memories of memories
throwing flour onto a ghost, only to mess up-
the stone cold floor beneath. it has no answers.
perhaps being small enough to fall into a crack is a gift.
one that inhabits the void with a sense of how vast it is.
a forever nightmare echoes here. infinitesimally small and large.
that which is too big for me and my ideas of how and why.
it seems self evident now that the mystery cannot be understood,
that I must break a self trying to find what could never be found.
but the feeling that lives in the body, in the swallowing and rising.
this i know. this i trust. this has nothing whatsoever to do with me.
it is sentinel. it is tingling body bliss anticipation. it is life. life itself.
papier mache face
paste and glue another layer
all that remains now
Paul… you are such a soulful writer. I read.. and I listened.. and I felt deeply. Thank you for sharing.
Two reads and it still needs another. This says so much. Love it.