Tilt back your head and let open your mouth, set free all that creeps inside. Climb, vines, between canine and cranny and curl. Seethe, moss, dripping lace down past your lips– levy, roots, latticed, sprawling, deeper than your feet have the courage to travel. Bare your teeth. force them to bear your truth.
When the clouds are heavy and the sunflowers turn their faces to the ground, I walk amongst the fields. I breathe in air that turns to static in my lungs and sets me electrified, a jolt to my step to match the sky. It is dim out here, and the rain does not tiptoe when it walks, but I hold flowers above my head. The flowers catch the rain and the rain catches the flowers, and against all this gray, those yellow petals never glistened so bright.
The ocean knows you by what you leave behind, pouring into your pressed sand-prints to learn the tides of your gait. Its waves sweep your hollows into its own, tumbled through the rolling sand, another taste of you for the undertow. It laps at your feet and asks “yet? is it yet?” A hundred borrowed shadows just past your heels. The ocean is vast. The ocean is deep. It rasps your name in salt.
The pond sits still at the end of the path for eyes that also wander–the mirror edge of its waters offer you up, never mind that you are bitter. It knows you as the flame know its tinder, as the earth knows the root that crawls along its flank– it knows you in silhouette and solid, simple and silver, and it casts you truer than the sun would dare. See the tusks you tuck behind your lips and the fur bristled on your back; see the wild thing, the aching beast, the sledge that hangs harnessed from your shoulders. Perhaps see only a ripple. Wonder if you have thrown the stone.
There is rot in you– fine, there is rot. Maybe at your fingertips, or under your tongue, or maybe in those parts you cannot see, but feel, crumbling between your bones. So you know that there is rot. But you are not the only one; we are all fetid beasts, breath between our teeth coming death-sweet. Sing your sorrows if you must, but come find us in our garden. We plant our rots together here and give them a place they may decay, and make themselves something more– iris climb from curling skin, lilies lilt like ribs. No bruise alone knows how to grow, but together we’ll teach them to bloom.
cling to hope until you are torn from the ivy-wall and your nails are red with belief. one day your roots will go deep and the stone will crumble underneath all the hope you’ve hoarded. until then, you must clutch at whatever cracks you may– but if you do not hold on now, you will never rise.
When you nurture loneliness, it is the earth itself you tend, tilling it over and over itself until it is damp and giving beneath your feet. Softer with every rain. When you pace the edge of your field, solitude lets you wear yourself into its surface, sloping grooves set just your size. It will not bloom, but if you look at it long enough, you can see the places its petals would go, the beauty it might hold if you were something other than yourself. But you are not, and you are lonely, if you try to leave these fields, your love becomes a leech-mouthed mud, sucking at your heels.
