V. H. King's Ink

it’s so easy to pray for someone
else,
believing they will know
the fullness of grace,
care, comfort, compassion.
I trust they will be surrounded,
reassured, safe-kept through
every ache and anxiety.

but me?
well.

whatever my connections, they have
neither face nor name.
no concrete dogma
no concise discipline
no term or title
for whatever it is

I do, I am, I believe.

in the sunlight, in the night sky,
between stretched out cornfields,
on city and state highways,
for everything burned and buried and birthed
in a back yard—

in the taste of smoke on a screen door
and the touch of a water sprinkler
across my calves and the cool whistle
of a breeze on my ankles, tickled by
ants and blades of grass:

I am here.

dizzy now, after reading deep
into the dark while the moon meanders
up from the horizon. I sink into
my home.

there are no arms to hold me
here; I can only hug myself if I stop
worrying myself through acceptance
and denying myself peace. the only stage
of grief is right now, out of left field,
front and center to a sold-out crowd of everything

I’m scared of
repeating
forgetting
reaping
forging
resisting
foregoing—

and I always tell myself things
like healing happen by degrees, but
my compass is broken and it’s hard to think
this side of the equator of my blurry childhood.

I can’t claim nostalgia or amnesia.
I have no longing for that loneliness
because I remain lost in it: my daydreams
floating along for company. I have stopped
hoping to be real, one day. the tangible
world, that previous privilege to hold
and be held, is not afforded to me.

I thought I could heal my way into being
whole enough to matter, but my particles
don’t condense anymore. I’ve set aside
that desperate drive to hold weight and water
and the kind of warmth that makes
a person want you.

spirit body,
knowing ghost,
I claim these as my own.

I will not sleep; I am the dream;
lifetimes revealed in my wake and memories
reveled between my waking—and I too
will rise, reverent.

my stasis, poised. my equilibrium
infinite in that place where the sun
always shines and still it is always night
and the singularity of my existence stretches forever
on the other side of the horizon of an event I’ll never reach
until I breathe my last’s last