Spent

How can you ask me to spend my life here
Always asking for permission
For space, for rights, for my vitality

Contrition

I have so many things to say
All the shame I've been entrusted fills my mouth instead
And I am smothered when I try to deliver
This depravation is mutilation
And I am still languishing alone

Counterfeit

You can sustain the body
But when the soul flickers
When the soul is homesick for its nest
Away from this sensory coil
Our only consistency here is change and decay
I don't know where to find restoration
When I can't find rest, least of all in sleep where
My past will always find me
The fog and shadows played tricks
And outwitted my better judgment
Somehow I'm left with the counterfeit

Transitions: Two Hands

i reek of desperation
that's my prayer
a quiet whisper between two lips
through my skin and two hands pressed
for a life of peace without fear
without pain and without shame
to transition discretely
without unnecessary trauma
i'm so angry all the time now
and i haven't even started
so i ask dear goddex up there
to please help your lost lion
take the thorns from my paws
and lead me home to my pride
because i'm losing it down here
and i want to come home
send me soothing comfort
and your infinite patience
because im drowning in the way i feel

The Bat

Creature of the night
I like you cannot see the light
I am comfortable in this darkness
Eating morsels of my sins
Upside down in my own identity
I slept for so long and like you
I have awoken without a dawn
And flown into the darkness

Stuck

I want to go home and never return to this wicked world
But I am too weak to break the chains of my mortal coil
And too soft to free myself from pain by delegating it to others

Intimate

This was supposed to be my sanctuary
It was built on fault lines and rotten wood
But it was mine and I called it home
But lately it has conspired to
Evict the soul inside of it
To empty itself of its life force
And crumble into ash
My body promised my soul at conception
"In sickness and in health,
Til death do us part"
I don't understand why it insists on
Choosing the soil in a grave over me
It is the most intimate betrayal

Honestly

I feel I have reached the end of my rope
And now I'm left unravelling the ends
To tie them together again
In a single long thread
To try to reach the finish line
And I'm running out of ends to tie

Cleave

Stooped down to examine the unconsidered
Moving through the open mouth of the rat
I saw my pain designed
I was spectator and architect
Dropped into the lake of restoration
Knowing full well an elixir will never satisfy
Beasts and demons of chronic debilitation
A disorder demanding transformation
I am its subject
Too broken to remember restitution
Don't know where the platform disembarks
When I am a member of myself
And I can't dissolute.

Over Easy

Now I'm cracked again
And the illness has seeped in once more
And honestly I'm angry at you
Because you were the one who dropped me first
And you dropped me again most recently
I don't know why I let you hold me anymore
Perhaps it's because most times you don't drop me
And it's easy to forget you've been dropped
When someone's strong and gentle hands are clasped around your shell
It's hard to see the butter smeared on your fingers
Or to smell the toast in the toaster
Or the hot oil on the skillet
When you're safe inside your shell

Curly

I was raised
Indoctrinated in capitalism
Taught to measure my worth
By my rate of production
But never supplied with an abled body
I learned to play in pain
To normalize the broken parts of me
In order to survive in a society
With no space for the unproductive
Never supplied with an allistic mind
I struggled to shutter my thoughts
To focus on a single concept
Rather than a concept's singularity
When my intuition compelled
My interdisciplinary tendencies

Bilingual

The stomach is the body's mind,
A second brain so to speak.
I'm certain it knows more than I do.
If only my primary brain and stomach
Were more fluent in each other's language,
I'm sure I would be better for it.

52

So much of my time is spent trying to stack the deck 

So that the odds might be in my favor.

I build my house from the hand I was dealt;

And each time I have exhausted my efforts,

Finally creating some semblance of structure,

A gust of wind effortlessly knocks it down

And I am left to pick up the pieces

And try again. 

Orator

Maybe if I shout it from the mountains
and everyone hears it all at once,
then I can stop telling my story.