Eefera

my dearest - held captive by your fears and the pain you have locked away with the picture of us smiling in front of a waterfall. words are such pathetic things when 'hurt' and 'pain' contain the breadth of spectral voids and we say everything except "i'm sorry."

these dark holes swallow my four chambers in grief, the listing of a ship adrift and awaiting its silent descent. words scratched on scattered and broken shells with fingernails, incoherent songs told to the bones i carry within. i drag crosses over the bridges like thick black anchors so i will not glance over the side. confess, or this living death approaches with scriptural finality, your pleas for gentle mercy lost in the teeth of pale white tombs.

the scent of you is some kind of familiar drug love and warmth and ecstasy rolled up in paper an inhale of poetry and fresh bread and your hands strong and sure on my hips i remember it all of it a hazy dream pinned to the inside of my prefrontal cortex but it's all shades of gray and the scent of you is different now confused and lost in bottled contradiction stopped up and sealed because feeling it is pouring acid over my skin squeezing breath away from caged lungs slowly like oxygen bleeding out in a trickle until we are brittle waiting to break are we gone forever? how do we come back from these dark nights huddled in hurt desperate for touches that only burn when they connect i want you the you that i thought i had but never did maybe hope let us down after all.

girl you’re low hanging clouds on the mountain give it all back put the responsibility on their shoulders you don’t want to die you don’t want to live the way you feel I hear you breathing out of lungs trying to stop breathing sit with me on the sideline of your grief your pain I know what you’ve seen I know you like the back of my own hand and you’re still discovering who you are. smile it’s pretty I promise you won’t lose me in your dark you pulled yourself up away from the barrel of the gun, the bottle of pills, the sharp knife on the counter and you’re breathing I love you and we're alive.

i wrote you a love poem on a butterfly's wing and set the sound of your name to a song and i told you the words in a whisper when i took you into my arms tonight.

i whispered your worth in the dark places i carried your bones in the sky far below the place where God sits and the souls of children weave star lilies in the wild after. the soft touch of fingers ghost over your eyes while you sleep and this lullaby pours from my lips a song i have sung before to different ears than yours a spell of my own making self-taught wisdom and the memory of sweeter hands lifting me from the deep this prayer is born in a place of silence and scars. oh Father, forgive me for I know the darkness well let me walk through the valley of shadows but bring this little one beneath my lullaby close against your heart.

"child," you never say my name but you call me from the windows of your great keep somewhere in the clouds and sometimes you ask me to remember. green velvet and lace tied around my waist with ribbon i am the doll on the shelf porcelain lips tinted with fake rouge to bring color back to my pale face do not ask me to come to you. i carry it for you, so that you won't be small won't be crushed in your world because little things can carry more than they ought. but still you ask me to remember and sometimes somewhere in the clouds from the windows of your great keep you never say my name but you call me "child."

i always come back to the water's edge dip my fingers in an artist seeking paint the colors are dark but beautiful strange familiar i find myself wondering will i someday come to the water's edge and sink beneath

i don't know how to write about this. i started a poem about winter and spring and the axis of the world and it drowned with a pathetic gurgle because metaphors for pain are too sophisticated too eloquent and too deferential giving way too politely to this kind of visceral ache. i learned to hold my temper and respect your choices because your actions are my responsibility. but then i learned to acknowledge my emotions because responsibility isn't always mine and sometimes - every time i pack the responsibility on my shoulders and my therapist wants me to believe that i don't have to do that anymore. i don't know how to believe. i think i learned the wrong way and now all the wires are attached to the wrong colors and i'm just colorblind trying to rearrange them. i don't know what i'm trying to say. i tried another metaphor and it's just ok. i'm not actually colorblind. you hurt me. i'm in pain. and all the words before this are useless.