We stay for the little things

Clutching angel numbers and each other like life lines

I still find myself having to write the way god speaks

Enigmatic breaths you can barely make out and certainly nothing tangible to hold onto beyond clouds in your mouth or feathers you’re usually too afraid to touch

Unkind dreams you can’t escape

Especially now

My hands stopped reaching out a long time ago

It’s not that their empty

Just mostly devoid of warmth these days

These days being

The winter of our dystopia

Which currently consists of warm rain

Innocent blood

And frozen emotions

Lodged somewhere between that time you offered me a cup

Which I mistook for ten

And the screams that likely still echo in my brothers ear

Oh brother

Wear art tho

Weren’t we?

Sisters and misters

Something of a canvas story

Standing right there

Hiding in plain sight

Everything you said you wanted

Though I suppose you never said why or what for

Somewhere between every nightmare of a past that refuses to die

In spite of his actual, uneventful death

And the light of Vastly Infinite Possibilities

Tiny violins play for your absolute

Horror of existence

All that wasted potential

Spent on actions categorized as chemical reflexes

Blame casted excuses

For every violent insult

Every robbery, rape, rifle, pillage and selfish repose

Every moment of absent-minded tenderness

Every ignored distress signal

We said stop more than once

Through writhing, shrinking, expanding and hand wringing

But they all just keep going

Don’t they?

We change locks and names

Disappear

Burn old clothes in ceremonial fires under fool moons

Write down the architecture of cumulative crumbling love stories so maybe someday the anthropologists can figure out what happened

Meanwhile gurus assault us with detailed descriptions of all the warning signs alongside accounts of seemingly endless moral failings

How dare you stupid girl?

How dare you

Trust

Have needs

Be made of flesh and nerve endings

Be so incapable of starvation

But they’re everywhere

Buried in the ground

Ruling over countries

Sleeping on sidewalks

Living across the street

Descending like cannon balls from every second body

Voracious ghosts

Gently haunting all the space

Somewhere in between

The beginning

And

The end

~

The good thing about an abuser dying is that it breaks your heart and poetry falls out.