When all your body is
doing is crying
for you to cry from the moment
you wake through all the threads
of the day, pull pulling ocean tide
drifts inside another even colder
ocean, silver
torrent of grief, wider than any river
you've ever seen and it's calling
you to dive, depths beneath
the pull pulling you to spiral, eddy
down with the red leaves, yellow
leaves and brown, the brown
and white geese diving
for fish swimming even
lower, the temperature dropped and dropping
even lower, grief begs
you to fall. Shhhh. Tis the season,
tis memory, tis
the way, the only
way you can be to get
through the day because you have to
clean someone's house. So you
swallow. You bite
the water down, you do not let
your eyes betray you but they
must - they're red all the time! And time
passes, the house is clean
now and will get dirty again and
pine needles, ornaments,
candy canes and chocolate
kisses you pocket cuz aren't they
for everybody? Aren't you somebody
who candy can be for? What's so formidable
is all that umber sorrow
has to go somewhere, if you can't let it go it
absorbs back into the body it can't
escape, into the liver perhaps - is that
why mine is swollen? Because I'm not
free and even if I were, the light
in the world for me seems
to have gone out. There is
no bottom? Because the grip
you must sustain to keep the whole thing
together, the dam
from collapse, is
relentless, a feat
of engineering only trauma
survivors get. Yeah yeah, survive
to tell people all the horrible
shit they don't wanna hear, they want you to keep
quiet or vanish. Varnish those
wounds with maple syrup and
honey, it hardens until tears
fall, salt-
water a melting and a fire. Burn me
to the ground, I'm already ashes
anyhow
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