Lost has too many syllables to scream

I am alive. With gorilla hands meant more for destruction than gentle winds made of promise. I think there are four walls in my brain but I keep opening windows to smell the rain. Dust and dry land in sight. Jump, it begs me, like I know I know the color of dawn at midnight.

Hands remind me of articulation, five pointed sentences with chapters swimming between veins. Call them flooded river valleys. Call them hydrothermal vents. Canyons, maybe. Erosion. Change made of tears or joys or two eyes that only know to handle wild fires when it is devouring its own color. Wood smoke keeps tangling my name with freedom, heart; love in the wisdom lost in translation. Maybe lost in the coal-wasted excuses that reminded me of miles not yet tasted, not yet heard. Melodies overturned.

I’ve forgotten something – my name, my self, my ulterior resignations – demands on blood without lines meant to cross or uncross or divide. It isn’t even sure anymore. So how can I be? I keep believing winter, blue skirted and decorated for frosted grounds, crystal quakes and names that don’t rhyme with red or pink or mid-morning coffees because the sun is already awake.

I’ve crawled from my identity and am trying to stand on horizontal lines running on and on and on, all the while I keep looking back and around and wondering when I stopped leaving trails of sand and agate and pine in my wake. And I keep telling myself that I am not a tangle of juniper and sea brine, that a heart can’t be owned by two places by hands held and thunder rolling over grass covered hills, red dusted and treasured. I keep telling myself that I am not tsunami-ready that that that there aren’t kelpie songs braiding my hair or rattlesnake warnings twisting my knuckles. That I am not divided by the high desert or the quailing of the ocean surf.

But I am. I am I am.

Neither beneath me. Neither here.

This is more alive now than two years ago; when ink still knew its way around my ribcage, bled from my fingerprints and made me visceral and present.

This places has slipped down my pen, built doors next to windows – discontent, impatient, bland wakefulness – sparks like shattered glass dancing in the sky. And there are secrets here being spilled by flames failing to tell itself of its own end.