Some Poems

Still in Love

Blurry focus soft-spoken whispers of grief.

Grieving not silent, intangible.

Still in love. Finding freedom in constriction—an imposed

imprisonment. Imposed bars, cage

around arms and legs, chains

heavy, a burden 

so powerful I’ve come to love

the gravity. 

Gravity, weight, this weight reminds me 

I am here. 

Here. Here looking, here, here breaking here

Crying/ laughing/ sleeping/ screaming/ choking/ hoping—

I am so hopeful. 

Where does sadness go

When it leaves your vision?

When is stops inhabiting

Your skin 

Where does sadness go

When it leaves your lungs?

Still in love. A kind of need.

Why do we carry burdens

We never deserved in the first place?

How can we know and feel so much and still 

cling to the weight. 

Still clinging. Still carrying. 

Thereʻs a selfishness in my love affair 

with sadness, 

I’ll be the first to admit 

It is a selfishness which precludes

Healing. scatters my light, 

Fractures it, keeps me dim & dark & unseeing.

Sometimes I still don’t want to see.

Don’t want to be…

Whole. 

Some small part still clings white-knuckled 

Afraid if sadness is gone,

Then this weight I’ve carried so long

(never really knowing why)

not having known why for so long

that its’ rationality, itʻs place 

is embedded in my psyche, 

Somehow its words have become my heartbeat 

and breath-sounds and my vision its 

become who I think you am 

who I’ve thought I needed to be for so long. 

And now. 

I donʻt want  to carry this weight. 

I don’t want these tattoos across my eyelids,

fingerprints entwined with its’ touch, 

my ears filled with its screams. 

But part of me is still in love. Still afraid. 

Afraid to lose the gravity of this weight—

Maybe this is the only thing holding me together,

The only way not to be torn apart. 

Still in love. Still hopeful.

Still clinging/ sinking/ loving/ breaking/ hoping. 

So I’ll admit. I’m still in love,

it’s turning out to be

one shit-show of a break up.

But I ask you—

What are you still in love with? 

What are you afraid 

If you let go off, 

You’ll be too free to finally see 

your true potential 

What are you still in love with?

Yet so ready to release yourself from?

And, when you know that I ask

What is stopping you?