You get discouraged, don't you, girl?

It's your brother's world for a while longer

You gotta dance with the devil on a river

To beat the stream

Call it living the dream, call it kicking the ladder

They come to kick dirt in your face

To call you weak and then displace you

After carrying your baby on your back across the desert

I saw your eyes behind your hair

And you're looking tired, but you don't look scared

Mother always told me it was a dangerous world for a girl.

Even more so if that girl had magic.

She said people loved to extinguish

the bright flames that raged and took home in our hearts.

Mother was magic and they snuffed her right out,

so in the end, she was right about the world.

Man is a cruel creature.

They’d destroy the ground they stood on

if they could make a pretty penny off of it.

The day they came, Mother was in the garden,

tending to to the temperamental cabbages poking out of the Earth.

I still remember

the color of her wings

as they dragged her

away.

They were a silvery purple

that caught and reflected the light

in a way that made you think

you were up in

space somewhere,

among the stars.

That feeling when you accept

the unacceptable.

The shaky breath that only you

seem to feel.

The hesitancy in your eyes

when contemplating the question –

Why must life be so precise,

so known, so tangible,

as to forget the

mystery of the sky,

and oceans,

and millions of years of change

that make you shake

as if you were just a tremor

that was barely felt, maybe cracked a sidewalk

on an overcast day?

They call you existential,

you call yourself

alive.

But mainly,

you call yourself a mess

Just living this way

is as if

you were in the middle

of a

tempest

the feeling of Falling

of

empty

cold

gales of

wind and water and fear

would be enough

to send anyone running

into the corners of their own

dark head,

but when you are in that

corner

in that place

you must remember

that everyone walks on sidewalks,

even on the cracks.

Everyone can look down

and see

the grass

or flower

or piece of green

that struggled so hard to

live and grow in that

hostile place

and they will

see

that life can happen anywhere

and can be lived thoroughly,

even in the toughest

of places,

of circumstances,

or of minds.