Not a Poem About Grief
This is neither a cry for help,
or the invitation for uncomfortable pity.
This is battle roar and the beating of war drum.
This is surviving and learning how to heal with strange
fingers that pry at open bodily wounds.
It is the quivering of determined chapped lips,
and echoes of dry, working bones.
This is the aching that lay in hands who,
with a pen as their weapon,
attempt to piece together the feeling that
taps at the glass of their window each night.
An anonymous caller;
unwelcome, and yet, impossible to ignore.
This is the anxiety of bitten fingernails, and the
circles that slowly darken beneath the eyes.
It is the unnoticeable steps taken each day,
waking to the familiar feeling of staleness each morning.
It is the casting out of society,
and caressing the unspoken taboo that
the only universal truth in life is its impermanence;
the acknowledgement of our own mortality.
It is a moment of palms over ears;
both voluntary and involuntary.
It is the taste of teardrops in morning tea,
and the smell of leftovers in refrigerator gone bad.
It is a love affair between neglect and repression, a
chaos and unproud obsession.
This is what it means to string up a timeline of quickly fading moments.
Holding onto random smells and places,
tucking them away into jacket pockets.
Hoping to one day be able to weave them all together
and make sense of these fragments.
This is not a silly silhouette of some plea that has
peeled itself from the skins of loss.
We are not as fragile as we may seem.
We are the ones who try to resist the urge, to give ourselves up
to the inviting warmth of delusion’s double-edged sword.
And here we persist, holding our breath
until our bodies jolt ourselves awake, and lungs
force us into respiration once more.
This is not a cry for help. This is a call to warriors.