loosening

each of us knows the company of death's doorstep,
how to live intimate with the possibility of ending 

to be small is to live surrendered to the mystery of
being carried into each new dawn or not, having
control over nothing  except the aching cry in our
chest of wanting to receive tomorrow 

but death has many cousins not all of us have met

some are not just a slip in the ring of protection,
mishandling the tender grip on living we start out with

some are more robust than disguised good intentions
like styrofoam packed in our need for connection, than
forgotten algorithms of coaxing tiny footsteps into the
soil of their becoming, into the invisible tattoos of
intuition and instinct lining the coziest robes of thriving

some are not simply accidents, nobody wanted  but
we’re curled close to any way, nor a passive disdain
for the power of our living that leaves us cornered
under deaths blade and blamed for breaking

I’ve dreamt of a spiraling multitude, of stomped shouting
and fountainous wailing freeing every fiber of memory
from a cage of taking that cut through their living

some of us bare the mark of this covenant without ever
slipping off to our homecoming, instead dragging a
blessed burden through each rising morning, melting
horizons of choice against its own impossibility through
fields of quiet concern, through pleas for feigned
impersonations of one who has never traveled the edge
of deaths hungry road

our bodies are not made for this in between 
not free to leave or free if we stay

and if your way of carrying on can't find an unclouded
mirror this side of the underworld, is a wilting eclipse
hushing the blaze of your survival, if there are a thousand
small deaths, unmourned of tender parts that remain
and a thousand small resurrections, uncelebrated 

our bodies are not made for this in between, 
for surviving amnesia of how to call our spirits back

no one told me it's ok to feel afraid of everything, it is
how a body disperses the load of one single fear, far
too big, my heart breaks remembering the stone of 
my self-betrayal, my two hands set on finishing what I
refused to let that first cruel set of hands, so much
bigger than mine, accomplish, I know now it is what a
body does when it can’t find relief, it will turn on someone 

there wasn’t anyone to show me how to loosen the
burning ropes of my grief, to keep me from punishing
myself when I couldn’t make the hurt stop

this is for all of us, trying to thread our living through 
the eye of a needle, to halt a mounting exile inside
our own skin

how we lose ourselves isn’t the moment when more
than we thought we could be without is dragged from
nearly lifeless palms

it is the moment, no matter how many eternities of
seconds or generations later when we swallow the
searing eyes of those who deemed us deserving of
their most vicious imagination

it is how we lose hope the spreading cover 
of hurt will ever turn back

and this is how we begin to call off an angry mob of
our own cells demanding sacrifice, how we pull each
tentacle of hate from the quiet sting of its loneliness

how we remember beating hearts holding the quiver
of our chests when we weren’t supposed to

we become temples of commemoration of every spark
of wounded becoming, every messy untranslated radiant
eruption of claiming our sacredness, as we are