what color is your soul
when shadow ceases to exist?

who are you
locked in at night
behind the darkness
of your eyes?

are you even human?
every dignity gone,

all your dreams naked,
autumn branches
scratching at a bolted window.

the last question
they will ask you is

“If we have to use restraints,
should we call your family?”

last primeval answering cry from
deep in the forge-fires of
your heart, knowing:

there’s no one
you would want to tell.

you were my muse
and i was your poet;
i saw the rhythms of your soul:
they raced with me across a beach,
laughing.

so when you tentatively
held out your fingers, i
took them as a lifeline,
shut my lids to the
wounds of this world,
found a brighter self in your
ocean-eyes.  but like children we
swam too far out,
past the point where our toes
touched land, lost
our footing and ourselves and
somehow you found me facedown
on my kitchen floor,
sunk down in tears and pain,
not the girl you had
fallen in love with, not
even really
a girl at all.

in the darkness
you rubbed dry your eyes;
you shook yourself off;
you locked doors all around me,
blind to the reality that i
was already prisoner inside this
skin, and you, you walked out
under crying skies but
walked free nevertheless,
taking my heart with you,
leaving me to drown alone.

this is weregild for a crime never acknowledged, for
the piece of me stolen but never reported missing,
a momentary antidote threaded through
the pulse of the year’s dying
to feed feeling back into numbed fingers and
assuage the inquiet in the hollow place
just to the right of where my heart beats,
where if you put your ear close enough you
can still hear the roar and swell of the ocean,
hungry.  each wave as it crashes devastating
over me i will take and
take, losing shoreline with each
breath, hoping to find in the rush of a moment or
a brush of skin something
akin to going home.

hate
is what happens
when you’ve cried
out in the dark
for too long
without anyone listening.
when you’ve poured out
every bit of your
soul and
the one you love
sits back
and watches it
drip through cracks
in the sidewalk.
when the fear
in your gut
feels stronger
than your heartbeat,
and no one is there
to assuage it.
when time passes
without healing,
no lessening of the cold
creeping up your bones
and down into your pride
from having been
shoved aside into the October mud
where no one helps you to stand.
when, in desperation,
you throw out words
like firebrands,
bright warnings
through your darkest nights,
shooting stars
howling the hurt
that exists
as every single second,
and every single one
burns down and
fizzles out, alone
and unanswered.

i sit inside abandoned silence,
wonder
how many more
tears can possibly fall
before my body
exhausts itself
of moisture,
my eyes, my skin,
my veins
dry up
and my heart
turn to husk,
a clenched fist made from
four caverns of stone
?

photograph courtesy H. Del Negro, edited by J.S.L.

i forgot
how to write
anything
but heartbreak,
emptiness
and the hollow
carved into souls
who dared be
lit
from the inside.

albatross’d shadows
wing their way across
the spongy caverns of my
heartbeat, their darkness
keening into the cup
of my palm and slowing
my hand, swallowing
piecemeal my
spirit until
there is nothing
left of me but
fear.

I’m different now.
I wear shoes and don’t walk
in the woods anymore.
My world is smaller
and my hair is redder
and i forget how
to sing.
I look down a lot.
Cement-colored thoughts
prick the backs
of my arms, sending
goosebumps
up into an unconsciousness
i thought i’d left behind
years ago.
I miss my mother.
Sometimes i don’t
remember how to breathe.
There’s a hollow
just above heart-center
whose sternal contours i can
trace with a finger and
in the darkness sometimes
knock gently, listening
for sounds of a soul.

his crests are almost golden
in the sodden heat that folds
over these valleys like a heavy cream,
his eyes so
liquid they seem to pour
out of the angles of his face
as he looks at you,
contemplative.
he moves as if
he hadn’t a single care, as if
the troubles that brush
against him through your hands,
the hands of hundreds,
soak into the matte of his skin
just enough
to be reflected in the steadiness
of his gaze,
dripping down strength through
the stones to your feet:
they do not linger.

watching the dawn
drag itself up out of this
utter east from my
hotel window, i
open my eyes to
the truth that though
my skin and soul are
across the world
from the ring of barbed wire
strangling the hollow
inside my chest,
my demons are
no farther
away.