speak to yourself

Each time I catch myself sprawling out, languid, sure of warm weather and wantedness, it is there that the reciprocation ceases. Your voice is rock edged and a slick sheet covers your face.

The wanting me retracts and blazes and each day’s forecast escapes me. You are a stranger who can speak the words that I swear all seem true. Say I miss you, miss you, dear; I am weeping. Who lends me affection and the comfort of heat and then retracts the seasons in his own time? I am the earth falling prey to your ambivalence. I am the stones all unsure of god’s love for me. I am the creature and animal that questions its endowment of existence. You are a petulant, a fickle, a bottled up source of light. There are only flashes of color and then that sickness again which keeps me vomiting pages and pages and letters and leavings and confusion. But I bury the excrement of obsession deep. Like a cat, nervous, paranoid, shuffling and on the verge of panic. Some animal fretting and feeling this torture for the flimsiest of all substitutes for a real love. Hemmed in, unmovable, unmoved, and stricken with seriousness.

I wait here like someday you will wake up and the weather vane will cease in its unpredictability. like I will wake up in a bed that has collected moss. wake in a stationary seat with a mild, wet climate. Here, now, how could any species evolve in this space with the plummeting and soaring of expectations and desert dry spells?

You keep yourself here with your grasping and denying. You are here due to a series of ridiculous accidents, all of which you could have ignored. You are here because you don’t want to get better. not really. you are here because it is easier. This is the new chemical that keeps you sealed up in your room with that mediocrity. Lord help us if you will allow yourself to be satisfied by this. Help us if you will take—and gratefully—the few small signs, if you will hold on to the least of all those things that you have come across, if you cannot hold yourself up, woman. Hold yourself up, stand up, get off that bed.