acraein

Scrawl

down what you need

you come up short

nameless.

–

Crawl

on your knees

fingers flow in

darkness.

–

I saw

a photograph

where I possessed

kindness

–

I saw

within my hands

a certain knot

timeless.

And I’m laying in bed

But instead

I could be some drunk fisherman

Screaming the same shit at the ocean

That I did when I was a kid.

–

And in that wake

I take.

I could risk it all

Without much consequence, no pins

To pick and thread.

–

You told me everyone you know will die in your bed.

Funeral forgotten as every ghost erupts from your head.

All my friends have got a different dream

Well mine are taffy pulled in diaries.

–

And I’m living in my head

It said.

I’m the same dumb shit that danced on the sand

Mask donned beneath the celestial teeth

Laughing that the stars don’t know what they see.

–

You told me every way you know to get at me.

The floor of the fruitstand all strewn with seeds.

All my friends have got another dream

Well mine obey respectfully.

Reading tales about the dead

Why would they care about the legacy they left?

Do across the void we carry caring gifts?

Surely love is lost after the veil lifts.

–

In awe the way the kinder ones persist

Projecting love through the grey mist.

The others get forgotten though.

Forgotten lives of the so-so.

–

The cloudy bits I left for free.

When you go and take your memory

Leaving words to some bored entity.

A whisper ripe with ambiguity.

–

Will all the love and hope I leave

Touch my children’s children’s children’s sleeve?

Will I give storied forests or will I give scribbled leaves

Based on my disinterest in my own family tree?

–

When I fail and die

Where will my values lie?

I always felt my life was mine.

Privy only to the mind that sits behind the eyes.

–

To be better than us who came before

Is my borrowed motto at the core.

Maybe with a little swirl

Of “not everyone will change the world.”

It feels good to fall down.

To come up empty handed.

A life fulfilled

Has already ended.

And when you make

that sacred stumble,

wear that mistake

like a stony mantle.

Feel that weight

with the fury of opera,

close your eyes repeat

that half breath mantra.

Work that rock

with the voice of the season,

Tom or Mike or Will or Stevens.

A life aglow with sideline voices

who play out all your unpicked choices

You’ll run and run

and run much longer.

And in the end you’ll be

that much stronger.

At least that’s what I whisper

into my pillow’s feathers.