"Welcome home."

It is quiet

And I am too dry,

too susceptible,

to turn a page in the grasses.

Paralyzed in grief

Forcing a stillness to comfort me

Hearing resonance in news anchors

And non-existent whispers in the staircase

My steps are opaque

but my heart is what bears the affliction.

My only choice

Has already been determined.

Silence is everything.

Swallowing words

And choking on soap

This invisibility is heavy.

And it’s bruising my bones with rings,

and stripes

that I have earned,

or,

so I am told.

I am cemented in hushed sounds.

A statue of faded zeal,

Face chipped with snide

decorated,

seen and not heard.

“Don’t let it get to you” and

“This doesn’t concern you”

Like I am to be as forgetful

as a generic apologetic template;

As silent and ambiguous

as early morning fog.

On that 747

I thought I had escaped the nightmare

when really, I just entered a new one.

A new one that

that

I used to call

“home.”

Fill-in-the-blank

You’ve rid me of my symmetry.

I'm desperate for a closure that seems to be

as impossible as rain, as magic,

as light.

In my absence

I am curious.

How is it that you

will fill in the blank?

When I find myself alone

with

the things I think…

I am trapped.

Compassion,

somehow,

in the cruelest trick of fate,

becoming synonymous with pain--

that is what wins.

Because of your fire,

my mind is forged and skewed and marred

and

perfected.

My memory fits. 

Because, it is poisonous

to the logic

that you require me

to adhere by.

Now, my body doesn’t possess

any degree of symmetry.

And for you,

still.

Still

I’d tear down

the walls of my flesh

and race for the moon,

for every fucking double meaning.

Pounding heart,

dry faced,

asymmetry of soul and thought,

of voice and recall.

But at the end

I know what I would I find.

that

I poured,

relentlessly,

I poured.

and somehow,

I was emptied.

Here is where I exist:

Empty on the lunar plexus,

the metallic trampolines of your psyche,

where I have no recollection of a healing scab.

Yes, perhaps, it is,

almost

tongue-in-cheek.

Am I too tongue-in-cheek?

thanks to you

even that has double meanings now.

And never fast enough can I shed the illusions

Or fail to acknowledge,

That you are the contingency

which bends upon

the hinge of my dreams,

while I have become

some shade of absurdly dependent 

upon your levy

that makes me

whole.