You left in sandals
I saw you disappear behind a door
Sunday is 24 years & 9 months away
No overnights halting careless lines
You left & my heart followed
Nowhere to run from empty
It’s all away from you
I was saving my ticker for later
A coward lost within an empty chest
Now here I am & you behind doors
I didn’t look back, crawled away
X look past the past in us to him
See how the wild fear her?
While you told mom to notice me
I didn’t look back in case she caws
Fearing Xs clawing doe eyes if met
Instincts to cower have little control
Our gaze worms through sanity alone
You took fear along with my heart
Left me with a seed to tend
Created a space for Death to seed
Vacated gardens know no fear but longs
Trusting emptiness, I still beat for you
I have nothing to lose besides you
All people lovely & hungry are sharks
Terrorizing pools without a tag or license
I am not at home in this rental
One bed empty by surrender
How to live silenced like sheep
Or lambs shorn too soon
Pride in our peeps commanding no one
Royal Airforce of nothing, rarefied you
One closed-lip at a time for little things
Growing wilder in traps shut ticking
Fingers on the impulse halting potential
Fated to a failed rescue mission
A fool’s endeavor like Jonah & a blowhole
Whatever the outcome we are Geppetto
I move forward not from courage or fin
Ahab hunts from beneath with Lucifer
No longer from rage & rampage like Job
Harpooning below the sperm whale’s belt
Hungering with a trident
Dying from consumption
Cross the line from terror to the unknown
For some rest & relaxation from normal
Some shine dying to be borderline
Like the skin of an ocean calling us out
Most go mad following salty crumbs
Doctors & Frankensteins in fresh pursuit
The line moves deeper past lights arrows
With each beat Death moves farther
Follow her down no farther
It is not mine that moves, but love’s depth
Tugging me tighter like a bow & target
Release, each aim is personal even if lost
Most die in shallow depths, meters short
Not knowing what lies beyond dying
A few feel the twilight zone in zero-G
Even fewer know space’s limits by heart
We train daily to lose our minds
Like Lord Byron, they usually come back
Braking for children & schools of eels
Brush up on being present before meeting Death
As birds head south to comfort in her hemisphere
When Earth looks down
Caribou head North for home & honey
As humans head South toward Death’s preemie
The mad BASE jumping lit from both poles
Most fear the pilgrimage to nursing homes
Yet refuse to walk on the wild side
Others return to Death like a VRBO for lovers
Long-term rentals are forbidden
In the Valley of the shadow of Death
Ownership would make you Hades or Satan
Stuck in a pyramid scheme poorer than before
Richer if you think you are at the peak on a whim
How does Death feel holding a scythe so long?
Should we spare Death the trouble of humanity?
With our Global Warming & microplastic?
Observe longing & reunion as Death observes
Next time I experience loss & grief
Before, I thought I & a few were living fine
Later I see them as schools of minnows & seals
The rest hunted me with barracudas hounding me
Terrifying & destructive wading in desperate waters
All my glacier are crumbling by choices unnatural
I have rejoined the procession of the mad & dying
Willingly, sanity has tagged my mental disorder
Any move I scheme can be used against me
When the empty space where a heart used to be
Naturally sinks into its wild crust to crumb
Sweet quicksand for a head in plush pillows
Arrive else I will go mad
Like free unrepentant divers
Who stay too long & rise without air
Waiting in the midnight zone to claim
Freediving into my midnight soul too quickly
Keep 1 eye on the white rope fading
Should I wish to go further on a dare as a whale
Going against the countless bubbles is an art
Too fast, heads will burst on crimson fields
Three years waiting for my heart to return
Is easy compared to 24 years in a day apart
Or Death handing my baton back familiar
Now you’re gone, the dark side awakens
Even the ball & chairs rattle me to evolve
Next, reincarnate turning on genes
Is it pride to hope like a base pair?
Hope my karma is altered by legend
For the next-gen grouped as disordered
Inhabiting a bipolar architecture off its axis
Reviled behind doors of docs & lovers
As the green door barring togetherness
Opens by the nature of doors
Love endures tethered by polarities
But embraced by all things wild & patient
We discard ballasts to join love with deep
Embraced by bracing cold, dark like birth
Undeniably fierce to crown wanting to abdicate
Our vulnerability is in the air fuming shallow
My aches glaciers shedding tears in skyscrapers
Heading back to Eden on Sunday years older
No more living in the tide pool
I’ll die with crustaceans reborn as a sprite
Does Hades think I’m Persephone?
Choking me twist by twist, his engagement?
Back within Pluto’s dim gravity & icy face
My sun too far, I break orbit on a sneeze
Somehow something remains in space
Every time reunion happens
Is it love or a big zero?
Is Nature or her perversions?
Or a lie laundered to look clean?
Does it matter how you get to white?
It doesn’t matter how you went dark