Foundations.

Fragility and love go hand in hand.
Fragility and vulnerability and, at the same time, strength to make man do the unthinkable. Love emboldens us and empowers us and makes us shatter like glass marbles on the floor.

We grovel for it, we go insane over it. Some die for it, some die without it. And it's almost ironic
that we were made by a creator to need, more than we need food or water, and not just need, but would be willing to beat ourselves to near death to search for and obtain,
something so destructive.

The economics of investments. We all risk too much.

pax

Come back to me when you are strong,
when bark has grown over your broken stump and your branches stretch
to graze the clouds, and I

I will climb up into them, sturdy, fortified
no longer needing to fear the sky,
nor roaring winds, nor rushing tides.

Come back to me when you are whole,
when you are a darker shade of bold, and no longer turn your face
away
from lightning in the stormy night, or the brightest rays of a burning sun

and we will plant our roots deep in the ground
and know what it is to have climbed the tallest mountains
to have found each other at the top.

Brutal openness

"Please remember me....
....With maps, a mountain range, a piggy bank
A vision too removed to mention."

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I've always wondered what it'd feel like to be sucked into the black hole.

I've always imagined it'd feel like your feet were getting sucked out from your legs that were getting sucked out from your hip socket that was getting sucked out from your spine which was getting sucked out from your ribcage. And your lungs would collapse into your brains, but not before your heart stopped beating into a gaping, hollow void.

All that in a split second before you numbed and disintegrated into nothingness, and I think that I've always thought that the sensation, if dragged out into an extended period of time, would be similar to what I feel

now.

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I exist. Barely.

The folds of my sheets protect me late at night. They protect me in the early afternoon. They stroke my hair until I fall asleep at dawn to dream about things that jolt me awake four hours later.

I have no need for food. I don't feel much of anything, certainly not hunger.
The Kalahari sits in my eyes, hazy with the heat, dry and arid, immobile, save for small stirrings of reptiles buried deep in the sand.
Those stirrings, they remind me to blink. They remind me to breathe.

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I search for your words like a blind and starved man digs through garbage for food.
Not even words directed towards me, just any words from you to others. Just so I know that you're still there, maybe in polished condition, maybe in battered condition.

I drink them in, those words pouring over the cracks in my chest. I drink and I drink and
I thirst.

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My love, don't cry yourself to sleep.
You're still in every word I speak.

Avril

Spring has arrived, and I, too,
am bursting into bloom. But not in the way that a tulip opens up to receive the sun,
eager, stretching, face pointed upwards,
lighting up walkways, resplendent with color

But rather in the way that grass forces itself from the impossibly tight
cracks of concrete sidewalks, bent and brown,
trampled, drying,
stiff,

dying

to catch a glimpse of something new.