loosening

each of us knows the company of death's doorstep, how to live intimate with the possibility of ending, to be small is to live surrendered to the mystery of being carried into each new dawn or not, having control over nothing except the aching cry in our chest of wanting to receive tomorrow 

but death has many cousins not all of us have met, some are more than a slip in the ring of protection, mishandling the tender grip on living we start out with, more robust than disguised good intentions like styrofoam packing our need for connection, than forgotten algorithms for coaxing tiny footsteps in invisible tattoos of intuition and instinct

some are not just accidents, unwanted and curled close anyway, nor a passive disdain for the power of our living, that leaves us cornered under deaths blade and blamed for our breaking

I dreamt of a spiraling multitude, stomped shouting and fountainous wailing freeing every fiber of memory from a cage of taking that cut through their living

some of us bare the mark of this covenant without ever slipping off to our homecoming, instead dragging a blessed burden through each rising morning, melting horizons of choice against its own impossibility lacing fields of quiet concern, pleas for feigned impersonations of one who has never traveled the edge of deaths hungry road

our bodies are not made for this in between, not free to leave or free if we stay

when your way of carrying on can't find an unclouded mirror this side of the underworld, is a wilting eclipse hushing the blaze of your survival, if there are a thousand small deaths, unmourned of tender parts that remain and a thousand small resurrections, uncelebrated 

our bodies are not made for this in between, for surviving amnesia of how to call our spirits back, to feel afraid of everything, is how the body disperses the load of one single fear, far too big, to turn on someone when you can’t loosen the burning ropes of your grief

this is for all of us, trying to thread our living through the eye of a needle, to halt a mounting exile inside our own skin, how we lose ourselves isn’t the moment when more than we thought we could be without is dragged from nearly lifeless palms, it is the moment, no matter how many eternities of seconds or generations later when we swallow those who deemed us deserving of their most vicious imagination, it is how we lose hope the spreading cover of our hurt will ever turn back

and this is how we call off an angry mob of our own cells demanding sacrifice, how we pull each tentacle of hate from the quiet sting of its loneliness, how we become temples of commemoration of every spark of wounded becoming, every messy and untranslated eruption of claiming our sacredness, as we are