It's Everybody's

Wrangle on harvest moon,
you're a bit more menacing
than a painting.
Just a little too sharp to be real.
Just a little too real to be comforting.
Just a little too spectacular
to be anything more than
the long awaited
expression of the world's
heavy groaning.

We need you to be.
Your orange blood,
illuminated in our retinas,
your captive caverns
calling to us gently.

Because we are tied down.
Not by gravity,
but by souls.

Souls of people who surrendered
their humanity in pain.
Souls of people who never liked breathing.

We are heavy,
and we wake up each morning,
soothing jazz,
clipping drizzle,
dim seagulls in the fog.
Wrapping our arms around
our coffee and hoping
we can forget why we must
stomp on through life.

But there are moments
when we pick up a sixth sense.
Our past haunts behind us,
our unknown future
the black hole in front.
And we remember evil.
We remember hate.

We remember that time,
when people couldn't see past
their differences,
We are assaulted by the
empty gaze of a stumbling
child with nothing.

We sit down,
because we think of our
grandfather living without
his other half.
Some of his body gone,
and we see his ready eye,
his waiting eye tilted toward
the horizon, coaxing it to end.
Life to stop.
Finish.

We are heavy with injustice,
with bruises, with sickness,
with blood; with misunderstanding,
with lonliness.

Lonliness, that we have felt
scratching at us.
This vague oxymoron,
this feeling
riding on everyone's back,
and aching of simple no one.

You say they can't know,
but they do.
They don't try,
but they could.
You waste away heavy,
and leave a pile of yourself
on the kitchen floor.

I, the heroine,
the addict, I tell you
that I waste away too.
But wake up.

The moon is there,
Your pain is laid
bare in the sky.
And it's everyone's pain.

It's everyone's.
And you can remember,
that even if their
lonliness and their
rememberings are a
different color...

They all pour together
into a giant pot of
blending, churning
race,
status,
knowledge,
gender,
preference,
belief
and they color the moon for you.

They color the moon for us all.

Clarity

Please come to me
long stranded places
of straw and foreign
birds that are the
substitute for the radio.

I will wear my rainboots
every grey day,
and my bare feet
every sunny day.
I will wear my linen dress,
it will dance with the wind,
and my body,
and no one will be there.

My bed will be velvet,
and my floor will be wooden,
and the cliffs will drop down
to greet the great grey sea.

The sea that becomes
one with my aged,
ankle dropped soul.
Quicker, every morning
that I hold my yellow mug
and swallow my coffee
and stare into the
calming expanse of another world.

Somehow, this complicated
heavy world is an elixer
that quenches every bit of fairy made
wanderlust that eats at the corners
of my purple brain.

What is there to find here?
Sea salt mushrooms,
barnacles that are the ambassadors
to our dry world.
Dry and cold, light and airy,
this paper in the wind world,
that borders the expanse of sea.

The eigth dimension
the unexplored oblivion
that clouds our minds,
and stops them.
Why do we look out at it
so goddamn much?

Because it gives us a chance.
A chance to live
without halting, without clarity.

Don't idealize clarity so much.
It is not all that it is.
It is haunting, dirty, baked and brittle.
It's cavernous.