the wheel
The wheel is whirring, endless loops to distract from her surroundings
The surroundings? tall, thin bars are an inch wide at best yet she can’t fit. She can’t do it, she just can’t do it.
she can grip the bars tight, all the way to the top, across she can jump. she smacks her head before her body falls, all the way down, and thumps the ground.
she just can’t fucking do it.
exhausted from this stupid exercise of what her life is; again, she reluctantly returns to the wheel. The blue wheel. Why is it ALWAYS blue?!
Her feet rushing and incessant. If she runs just a little bit faster she can expel her energy. Her metabolism billowing from the sound of the wheel roaring and squealing. Maybe if she pushes a little more, it’ll change, maybe everything will stop. Maybe the energy will go away.
Again, no, it’s back to the wheel.
Even faster it continues humming until a small hope flashes across her senses. The smell of fresh watermelon to cheer her up, now she’s the one squealing as she snatches the rotten, crumbling flesh of the fruit falling between her fingers. Quickly, she chomps through each hydrating bite. Within seconds it’s gone, and she’s left alone.
Left again at the wheel.
That fucking wheel.
An Ode to Leaving
I make peace with death in waves. In a call missed, in the shaky rattled tone of another impermanent’s voice clothed in fear, in the leather-tightened and knotted hands of a mother greater than you and I.
These waves have crashed again, and again, and again since you’ve been gone.
A heightened heartbeat thumps loudly in my sweltered hot ears while a knot in my throat sits just above my heart, shallowing my breath, allowing scarce space for my own life to continue.
It’s heavy. Somehow the drumming rings so tall, yet the cavernous depths trench throughout my sternum, the pain so deep it’s disgusting. A sickeningly cruel joke to have been able to love someone so deeply at all.
I spend many moments remembering your voice as clear as a light blue summer sky. Your favorite color was blue and you always told me not to stare at the sun, it would burn my eyes and turn me blind. I can hear the smirk at the end of each word when you answered the phone, the tone of true love when you sang about the bunnies and you giggled, bumping us on the head.
Mamma, you haven’t answered that phone in a very long time.
I suppose you leaving prepared me for all the different ways they would leave, too. Nothing could ever feel the same.
Void
The air is silent and unwavering, while a buzz substitutes its normal liquid movements around all of the material entities that are tossed about the yard. It’s our HVAC unit reminding us we have finally received the so-longed for heat of summer.
In the farthest corners of my vision, this little man stalks his prey. His movements are calculated, shoulder blades tucked in and low to the ground making a visual slow rumble with each step, articulated and soft. He snatches a small bug, chomping through the intermittently shining life that symbolized dusk.
He has made his way through another long day of hunt and play, and now it is time to rest. His slender body lays flat against the still dew ridden ground. Weeks of rainy spring time unrest soaked through the shallowest layers of the earth, helping cool his belly from this long awaited sun.
His fur is as black as the void, but in the summer light you can see the tawny undertones, representing his many ancestors of perfect predators before him. He revels, proud of his simple accomplishments of the day, and for a moment, I too find myself able to kick back and appreciate the similar opportunities that can be so easily taken for granted.
To Adam
I owe it to myself
and to you, I guess, in a far more impermanent form than I
to rejoice your life where death now deputizes
remembering a cascading smile and an unapologetic laugh,
an unapologetic look, warmth in a friendly embrace, that welcomed my adolescence.
your form so honest and genuine, accepting of all things weary, tattered, perfect and imperfect, dismantled by the hand of man
no longer here
and where am I to you?