I Cannot Make Promises To You That I Might Meet You In Old Age In A Time Period I Cannot Predict I Cannot

The church bell chimes Eleven and I count One, two, three, and on And then after the last The soft cooing of an owl Plays above the forest Echoing across the sky As if to outplay the bell To claim this simple land For itself as it sings Every one of us to sleep

I've missed you Did you know? I am shy to say so Exposed, unguarded I confess I've been longing

I was a lake And you were drought Or the absence Of you was the dry Cracking of soil When I needed water

So you are my rain My dear, my love Caution swept away Kissing in the Flooding streets, I couldn't care

But to tell you so, I've been afraid Foolhardy, but hear Me tell you again I've missed you So you know

We speak in tongues The wicked we Me and my anxieties

Losing peace And lost to sleep No sleep tonight for me

My words are jumbled Mumbled sounds Can you find them In the lost and found?

Insane is pain In painful times These chains aren't yours But mine

This goodbye is so Conflicting I am heartbroken I am torn It is so difficult To think of you Leaving my life And yet it's so easy To wish you well

An artist can insert light into the world Reach into their own acid stomach Pulling out their intestines Shining, glowing, posing as hope Let me make it so Let me take my own guts in my hands Twist them and turn them Into a blue and red balloon animal Give it to our tired country The rotten thing does not fester Inside me today. Can I do it? I want to take pieces of myself That have atrophied and heal them Turn them into something resembling art

I like the smell of steady rain The sound it makes on glass Quietly crashing Against the window pane The clouds a wall of heavy gray A day that's seemingly mundane

In silence he takes out the pieces And I pick out the strain Then he watches me get lost in Faraway thoughts that drift away He can't hear our hidden heartbeat Like a drumming through my brain I might have washed away Still here in water we remain

Icicles on a tree branch, glittering The barren thing adorned anew Similar to the way the leaves grew When birds were still out twittering

The ice hangs like daggers or teeth Or diamonds hung around a neck A delicate or dangerous effect Be wary those who pause beneath

To catch them as they drip and fall And crash upon a wooden floor Shattered, a delicate thing unmoored Such glass is sweet at the end of it all

My dear, are you here? I reach out to you again From the delicate Attachment of my thoughts And you are sensory An actively forming memory

Do we live just once? I can't take the chance Believing we'll live twice Though that hope is nice We can never touch tomorrow And I won't survive on vices

The pious say a god created us Others say it was the other way around If one does not know What makes a fire light God would calm the fear of not knowing How to explain a lightning bolt To someone who has never seen a wheel?

We create our gods like a contest The best god wins, we are still arguing How to explain god to the secular? The inner voice whispers "You are afraid, I am here" And so gods form inside all of us each day Unknowingly, we become them

Dust, dust I am dust Brush me from the windows Or sweep me out the door Dust, dust Flying dust I don’t know where to land Or where I’ve been before