Who’s the reflection?
The mirror's face, a stranger's now, I find. I can barely look at myself without feeling sad.
I should love the stretch marks and the extra skin for birthing my girls and breastfeeding them for months.
Yet still, I can’t get myself to love this body new. Missing the old one that used to be here.
Beautiful Anomaly
Sometimes white coats may not have the best explanations. Saying Wolf-Hirschhorn syndrome is a lightning strike severe.
Though a lightning metaphor leaves a bitter sting. It was as if they said your hand is one destined to lose.
From now on I let the lightning's metaphor fade with the night. No need to focus on the charts and the odds of what you’ll do.
Because all that matters is the power you hold. And baby you have so much strength already. I see it daily.
Genes may be missing but that just makes You a real life unicorn. A one in a million baby.
Your condition makes you a beautiful anomaly, forever rare.
The Cumberland Breeze Moved Still [revised]
We hid under the Mulberry tree that had been scarred by the knives of Southern mischief two summers ago. He was seated across from me on a turquoise antique. The afternoon held its breath for us as he offered me his hand resting palm-up on my knee. And it unfolded slowly. His angled posture was straight, leaning forward to complete the missing half of my triangle. And his eyelids were partly drawn, set meditating on my forthcoming move. When I placed my hand upon his, for a moment, I was a child. I found safety in his comfort, but our love was a wildfire. The shade caressed the mood and from behind its veil of landscape, the sun eavesdropped and he sighed. Sweet molasses lacquered my heart and its beat bellowed baritone. He smiled. Then too abruptly I retrieved my hand from his to salvage a silkworm lost on his shirt. And with that, our moment became a memory We lost grip of our hope. But removed from the chaos happening everywhere around us, we spent one stolen hiccup in time under a tree with each other. And it was perfect.
Nonsensical. Noncommittal. Disingenuous.
She exists in a state of perennial, nonsensical gratification. Flitting from blossom to blossom, she quenches her thirst with ever changing flavors. The nectar of the honeysuckle has no sooner faded from her tongue, than the vibrant violet catches her attention. The morning glory, the lilac, the mums, the hyacinth.
She is too disinclined to engage on the same excursion a second time for fear it was her destiny to summit only once. Too disingenuous to admit defeat, she embarks on the journeys tailored to a skillset she hasn't cultivated, but rather been granted. Why conquer the dawn wall if she can walk up the trail behind and sit on the peak of the captain with her feet dangling over the aspiring climbers?
She's too afraid to decide on one meal, because there is a chance she may like another better. She samples bites from each like a famous critic. Never full, only a whetted appetite. Too soon, the restaurant is closed, and she has no choice but to go somewhere else to find a morsel to tide her over until she may embark on another journey, tasting, and tasting but never full. Noncommittal, lest she find herself satisfied: only to be let down again.
Youth. Beauty. Time. They are her pleasure and damnation.
Priceless.
Fallen clouds of thought brume below my feet, unsettled the soil, graining all-encumbering heaps like shackles of all-ensnaring dust. It strops along paling skin quivering from wounds inflicted prior.
Wincing & gritting away the pain is futile.
Blood, saps out the wound, dribbles seep down the scars.
Gusts whet— enslaving the mind in an asphyxiating flurry of whips & lashes that settle your unruly temperament.
Take one step forward in defiance of the currents?
You’re dealt with two choices.
Take two steps back,
Or die to its tempestuous torment.
My mind, a sea of rapids
A storm brewing in the distance.
I, a Helmsman,
Pressing my lips against the pendulum of my past,
Before tossing it into the sea as a relic of remembrance.
To sink...
Never to arise again.
Fighting against the demonizing grip of procrastination is an uphill battle I fear I cannot win.
But I fight.
I fight for fighting's sake,
to leave a legacy,
beauty or blemish,
And for my skull to mount the summit of the catacombs when it's all said and done.