How tight are the cloths bound along my hands?

Are they even tied at all?

I stand on the shore, salty water pooling beneath my feet. The sand gives way. I feel the coolness of a blade on my heel. I panic. Flail.

Fall.

Weeping maiden, trapped.

Am I?

The air only smells of the sea.

Are my captors lying in wait?

Or have they left me to my misery, knowing I would keep myself?

We are not ready when the

End of the World

comes.

You are there.

And I am here,

on these concretely

unstable steps

outside this quirky bookstore.

The anxiety of our

humanity

has reached its

apex.

The tension,

the unpurposed venom,

the constant imbalance

of our footsteps,

as we desperately circle

around and around

in an inescapable panic.

We write it down everywhere,

on our mirrors,

our notebooks,

our ribboned fingers, canvassed with kitchen knives,

tearing flesh from raw wrists,

yet still we exist,

trying to find the importance

in our life blood

that pumps

until it forgets how...

When Sorrow comes to visit, he doesn’t take off his shoes. Dragging and tracking mud from outside to every room in the house. He doesn't even pretend to wipe his feet at the welcome mat before entering. With each visit, his clothes become shabbier and his hands filthier. He always announces and apologizes that he can’t stay for long, he has others to visit. I always suggest water, but he prefers tea. Taking longer to prepare and prolonging his stay. We always listen to Etta while the tea is being made. I’m not ever sure when he’ll leave, some visits are more extended than others. No matter how long the stay, you can always tell he was here. The longer he stays, the more dirt and mud build up on the floor. The more smudges and streaks upon the wall. Even long after he’s gone and I’ve polished the floorboards and purified the walls, there’s still stains that he left behind. Forget-me-nots proving he was once here. Before he goes, he'll turn to me and say I should be grateful I’ve only got to scrub mud from the floors and trail a rag against the walls. If he were to take off his shoes, it would be far more mess to clean.

I wish to erase

Every sordid mistake,

Every slight flaw,

That sparked contempt;

In the eyes of those

I might have loved.

I'm not from a small town where everyone knows everyone. Where we stop to smile, greet, and wave. I'm from the capital, where the roads are scarred and the pollution in the gray sky is terrorizing school children with asthma before they even learn their ABCs. I'm from the city with the most violence. Car break-ins, assaults, and murders. Where people spit on the sidewalk, where the homeless man sleeps at the bus stop. Where every year, the same politicians promise if we vote for them, they'll be the ones to change this hopeless city. Then they turn around and use our tax dollars to vacation in places I can't even pronounce. But, I learned to drive on those scarred roads. I paused and waited on the playground as my weezy friends got out their inhalers. And I cried as many of them inevitably moved away. I gathered with hundreds of others on my city streets to protest those same politicians and seen the homeless man from the bus stop awake from his slumber to cheer us on.

water like a mirror reflects faces of the dead

in the play of light and shade I melt

time has stopped in the flight to eternity

bodies sail in the cycle of birth and death

river accepts everything

it takes the memory of things

in tranquil breath of reality

I float on the other side

I can fly higher and higher

passing the limits

born from a drop of creation

in the last gasp of life I pass