For you

For you who ask unanswerable things.

For you who won’t forget

though memory exacts (the sweetest) pain.

For you who seek.

For you who fight to win your story back

from other tellers,

who scribble monuments of words

to prove you’re no mistake,

you’re true, you’re real, you are.

For you who cry for mercy.

For you who cut memorials of ink into your arms.

For you who cut – just cut –

because you feel

nothing

and you have to feel,

to know life moves

forward, consequentially --

if x then y, if x then why

if xx   xx

   xxx     x

x   x    x

For you hollow ones.

For you, for you

who sit back on your heels

and watch us rage.

For you who run and cannot stop.

For you who remain.

For you bisected,

you whose yearning stretches out with hungry fingers.

For you alone or not alone and lonely –

especially for you –

a chest rises and falls for you,

I promise it.

A soul hunts you,

that knows you without knowing,

without words.

In you a fiery rose of beauty blooms.

Roar. Weep. Love. Rejoice.

Be still.

Stuck

This is where the hardest work begins:

to see that no is not a long perhaps

(the light so late discovered now is lost);

to watch the pain recede, but still

with sick discomfort pine for it,

whose searing edges

sliced away the excess, forcing choice:

stand now, or cease;

to dread what then remains --  

the hungry ache of grief

that seeps, a wellspring, through each seal …

There is a rising here.

That’s what this poem’s for.

The hardest work’s the trudging through

the hours and days of losing,

and the building up again.

Forgive me. Tonight

the hardest work’s too hard.

Tonight my mind is stuck on that perhaps

back at the start, and like a cry

caught in my throat

it won’t let me read further.