prose

It has been a Prosy day for us, but for some people it has been a wonderful day. Someone was rapturously happy in it. Perhaps a great deed has been done somewhere today- a great poem written- or a great man born. And some heart has been broken, Phil.

Take a shower, wash off the day. Drink a glass of water. Make the room dark. Lie down and close your eyes.Notice the silence. Notice your heart. Still beating. Still fighting. You made it, after all. You made it, another day. And you can make it one more. You__e doing just fine.

Maybe I live in the gates that lead to outbound international flights. Maybe that is home.And do I feel more comfortable at the departures or at the arrivals?

The city they are building asks you to stay; remind yourself what is worth keeping, while the lighthouse of your moan warns the ship of your heart that he is a stone.

It doesn__ matter how many times you leave, it will always hurt to come back and remember what you once had and who you once were. Then it will hurt just as much to leave again, and so it goes over and over again. Once you__e started to leave, you will run your whole life.

Decades from now, my grandchild is going to be a poet... And she's going to write about how she's a living testament to how her grandmother made love to hurricane and calmed the storm.

And perhaps, I'm a Tuesday night and you're a Wednesday morning the way we'll never even notice how we blend into each other.

When he asks you whyyou chose alone all these years.Tell him that it__ becauseyou love with all claws and bared teeth.Apologize for the scratchesthat you will leave on his skin;ask forgiveness for the bite marks.Tell him you never ever mean to love so hard, but you do.

Poems, even when narrative, do not resemble stories. All stories are about battles, of one kind or another, which end in victory or defeat. Everything moves towards the end, when the outcome will be known.Poems, regardless of any outcome, cross the battlefields, tending the wounded, listening to the wild monologues of the triumphant or the fearful. They bring a kind of peace. Not by anaesthesia or easy reassurance, but by recognition and the promise that what has been experienced cannot disappear as if it had never been. Yet the promise is not of a monument. (Who, still on a battlefield, wants monuments?) The promise is that language has acknowledged, has given shelter, to the experience which demanded, which cried out.

So you will meet many __omeones_ who will give a new definition to your name. And you can not build walls, must not close the door and please don__ hide,because if you ask me about hurt and loveI will say love. Love because the hurt will come and go no matter what, but only love makes it worth while. Only love can cure it. Don__ be scared. Go. Love.

I__ fighting my way into existence, and I will keep doing so until the end of time.

It's the smell of him in the bathroom, all I need to get ready for the day. Watching him get dressed, and the sound in the kitchen; a slow hum of a song and his movements, picking things to eat. The way I could observe him, for hours, just go on with his day _ or as he sleeps _ simply breathing in and out, in and out, and it's like the hymn that sings me to peace. I know the world is still out there and I know I'm not yet friendly to its pace, but as long as I know him with me, here, there, somewhere _ us _ I know I have a chance.

Watch me go. Watch me. Because you said i couldn't. Because you thought I wouldn't. Go on, cry now. Cry.

...and I laugh and I spin and dance and frolic in ecstasy and I... I hurt no more, while you...you petrified little man, are left to wonder if it's you I speak of.

I gripped against her like she was metal and I was all full of lightning, charged up and jagged and of that moment alone.

It was quite a beautiful thing, the way we simply just came to be, with no effort or trying and slowly we found each other__ hands in the dark. No chains or promises, just a simple sign of hopethat things will go on and get betterand that things and people and views are still out there, yet to be found.

The snow was too light to stay, the ground too warm to keep it. And the strange spring snow fell only in that golden moment of dawn, the turning of the page between night and day.

And I do. I do wonder, I think about it all the time. What it would be like to kill myself. Because I never really know, I still can't tell the difference, I'm never quite certain whether or not I'm actually alive. I sit here every single day. Run, I said to myself. Run until your lungs collapse, until the wind whips and snaps at your tattered clothes, until you're a blur that blends into the background. Run, Juliette, run faster, run until your bones break and your shins split and your muscles atrophy and your heart dies because it was always too big for your chest and it beat too fast for too long and you run.Run run run until you can't hear their feet behind you. Run until they drop their fists and their shouts dissolve in the air. Run with your eyes open and your mouth shut and dam the river rushing up behind your eyes. Run, Juliette.Run until you drop dead. Make sure your heart stops before they ever reach you. Before they ever touch you.Run, I said.