Solace

won’t you hold me in your arms?
I want to disappear into myself.
Love has left my bones,
this body cold with grave despair;
shudder, as the shock subsides,
as I suddenly come to find
my soul’s home has become
but a desolate cage—
I’m crumbling from within and
it’s more than I can bear.

dear friend,
what tragedy happened here?
I’ve been catapulted wholly
into some unholy state
and I can’t find my shadow
in the dark.

I’m afraid
something’s severed here
and all I can see is this chasm;
tell me, do you still
recognize my remains?
eject, disconnect
I but haunt my body,
yet still I get the sense
that I no longer smell of myself
but of this dread; my scent
steeped in loathing
for my mere knowing
this terror.

dear friend
the violence caged in my flesh
is blacker than I ever cared to know —
monstrous and menacing,
devouring the Life within me with cruel apathy.
can’t you hear the grief rioting in my body?
no, my trauma wears shades of unjust Silence
and no wails of mourning can escape
the gravity of the sun that’s died inside me.
for what sound could my spirit make
while Darkness swallows
the crests and troughs
of my vitality?

won’t you open your arms
for a moment, shelter me
and remind my body
of some kind of kindness
still left in this world?
…or else hold space,
from faraway let me gaze
at the stars in your eyes
so that I might trace
the shapes of consolation?

dear friend,
what pitiful thing happened here?
all the lights in this dark sky
have been blown out.
I’m collapsing inward into an abyss
of dissatisfying destruction,
tormented with regret that
disappearing thus wouldn’t be enough
to erase this intolerable blight
from time and space;
to reverse this energetic abomination
born into the world
from an unspeakable crime,
now embodied in me.

I wish to contract
so swiftly, so completely
that maybe this anguish, too, would vanish —
or is it shame?

rabid, sharp recoil becomes my inner Black Hole.

we needn’t discuss it—
the devil is in the details,
clinging to whatever scraps
might sustain that rapacious
black pit: Fear.

hell,
I could never blame you
for wanting to look away
from this ugly mess;
and hell is the guilt I feel
for asking anyone to come near
such catastrophic pain—
this selfish instinct for survival
was the only piece of my humanity
I could find intact.

but this havoc
that’s laid claim to my being
speaks only my name; so perhaps
you could spare some safe space,
some solid embrace,
without too great a sacrifice?

because maybe if you hold me,
my fractured spirit could cling to your touch
and find anchor in the Love felt there,
rather than rebel with fury
against the damage borne in my body.
so, in some sense stoic
I collect the celestial dust
of my shattered positivity
and hope you’ll forgive me for asking,
for how could I ever save myself
but by grasping Love wherever I may find it
and pulling my Self back
across this apparent event horizon?
how else could one achieve the impossible?

won’t you hold me in your arms, dear friend?
miracles in Love happen every day.