V. H. King's Ink

for what I dream and where I am, show me
what they see and the distance between all
these things that keep me from falling apart.
if I am to be stretched like this, let it be
for the sake of something more than God
having a laugh, curious to see what will happen
when my body has been squandered by disease
and my hope ravaged by the terrors of war
in an indifferent world.

for the grace of small comforts that hold us on Those
Nights when the mental DJ has memories
on loop but everything keeps buffering, so all
I’m left with is something that’s almost nostalgia
but might just be self-pity—when middle school
playlists live beyond their replay value, saying
exactly what we need them too, thirty half-lives later.

for all the ways we find ourselves crying on the inside
and lashing out with kindness and smiles and silence,
knowing but not saying why everything hurts
the way it does, because everyone is bleeding too
and the rotten tooth is in the ugly truth of what we
came from and how fast we’re going and the simple fact
it’s cosmically too late for any of us to turn this around.

for doing what it takes to get this out of our system
without doing too much damage; for those of us
who do our best to be kind to ourselves because
it hurts our friends’ feelings when we’re self-deprecating;
for realizing we never had to do or be anything
other than human, in all that gloriously divinely
mortal failure that lets us end and begin again
and again and again; for all we can neither control
nor understand, confirm nor deny, believe nor refute.

for everyone who looks to the stars and learns
how to live on this temperamental holy ground
hibernating our hope and holding our faults
out to the wind for every predator to chase
off a cliff; for holding our head high, to the side,
never turning an eye from everything that kills us
and choosing to live through one more minute,
just in case something interesting happens…