// Here Is the Flood //

Here is the flood. Here is everything in me I cannot name, I cannot hold on to any longer, I cannot identify and you will not recognize as me. Here are the ways my mind is deficient. Here are the things I worry about and all the things I wish were different about me but they never will be. Here is the pain, the colour of amber glowing fireflies underneath pines, here is my fear of death, it is written in Braille although I can read. Here is my fear of speaking and not speaking the colour of the faces of those who are holding back the same things I am, and this is the way it feels to judge, the colour of chains. This is how it feels to be judged.

Here is my mouth covered with black tape, here is my mouth wet with hunger, anger, love, greed, hope. Here is the way I pray, it is the colour of midnight, it is the sounding of a word of a God they do not want me to know about, because I am made of it, the colour of love matches exactly the colour of rejection. Reflection and deflection mix, we are without lenses, we use the wrong colour eyes. This is the body, my prayer comes alive when we touch in dreams. Here is worship, it tastes like the rain coming down and filling small and large puddles, lakes inside of stones in my mouth, in my shoes, here is all the poetry I’ve read. It is so much better than what I have done that it liberates and punishes me in equal measure.

Here is the struggle I struggle with, wanting like mad to touch the sky. Wishing like a child when I’m no longer allowed. Crawling like a wounded animal. Chanting like a witch or a monk or a hollow bird. Prisoners. Keys. Book shelving and brittle lace sleeves.

Here are the things about me I do not yet understand. Here are the ways I hide. Here are the ways I want to love you enough that you will never have to die, but I need to learn to love you enough that you can. Here are all the things I’ve learned. Here are all the things I’ve not learned and I should have. By now. Here is the yellowing of my anguish. Here are the tear stains, I’ll trade you anything, but it is too late. Here is the silence of the passing of time.  Let’s take a drink.

Here are the ways I am not enough. Here are the ways I’ll let you forget everything for a while. Here are the things I’d like you never to know. I think somehow it is better you do know, I hope that’s okay. Am I a burden? Am I a siren? Am I your muse and will you always think I deserve to be? I hate that this matters to me, but I also think it’s sweet. Tragedy and comedy, any given day of the week.

This shouldn’t be so long, I shouldn’t have kept you but sometimes your kindness is so endless I forget who is keeping who around. I love you for that.  I hope our changing doesn’t change us but how can anything about the truth be helped. We can tie the hands but not ever stop giving. This should not be so . . . I should not ask this of you. To look at me. To be seen. To be still. But here is the truth I keep in a small locket underneath my tongue, and I’m sorry before you even come close to it because I don’t know who I am, I don’t know the colour of this thing. Please understand: I’m showing you things I’ve not yet seen. It is not fair. If I were to kneel in front of you, bow my head down at your feet, would you know exactly who you are. Would you recognize this as strength and would you be strong enough to lead a leader, to comfort a comforter, to protect the protector, to mother and father the mother and father.

Would we understand eachother if there were no sound. What is God but the pain between us understood. Where is this coming from, I don’t know. I have only just now noticed my insides, life is becoming an x-ray, a screen, a transfer, though it seems I’m falling into my own hands, these words could be everything, they could be nothing, they could be mindgames, they could be spiritual text to last for all time as soon as they disappear, I would love to fall apart next to you, finally, completely, and have you bear witness, and have you collect me piece by piece by piece.

Are you still glad you came? Are you still because you can see me and it’s beautiful or because you are steadying yourself to run. I’ve lost my instinct, I’ve lost my ability to collect and interpret the signs, intuition (it turns out) is just free fall, I’ve given up all the ground I thought I’d won but now I see it was never really there to begin with. How is it that we make terrain out of pride, arrogance, cruelty, and then stake a claim. Smoke made of walls. How is it that people can live their whole lives and never know their own names. What is your favorite colour and by that I mean what do you see when you are in full orgasm. What do you crave, what turns your mouth to fire, your belly to claws, what about the way I move makes you want to cry.

This is the flood, I carry it in constant. I am swallowing it over and over and over hoping to spare the world from drowning in a disastrous sea of whatever this is I’m made of, the flood of the human things I would rather you couldn’t see.

What will kill us all is held inside, held back, forced down, it churns with the force of a thousand tidal waves, crashing, crashing, crashing upon the inner shores, only to recycle itself and return again. We walk around afraid of the flood. Pointing out there, out there, out there I see it coming in the red clouds, in the blackgray sky, in the thunder as it rolls up the ground like carpet, in the faces of the ones I cannot understand. In the other. But the other is the flood in me. All the human things you cannot see, one day this will end in paradise. One day you will see them all in me.

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