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I used to carry a cathedral in my pocket
Sanctified by the hush between a silver kiss and the upwelling of iron and salt that served in place of tears.
There was a time when a maelstrom lived behind my eyes, haunting the tips of my fingers
and the corners of my lips, hungering and gravid.
Sometimes still it feels there is no gentleness left to me.
I am shorn
and wingless,
and blackened by rot,
A landscape of desolation and despair, the fault at the center of being edged in brambles.
Still, when I close my eyes I can taste that these words are not the only truth.
There is the golden elixir of laughter in the sunshine
And the tart-sweet joy of quenched longing bursting on the tongue.
Everything which ripens does so in the fertile soil of grief and hope like ash working its way into the cracks callousing my hands and the lining of my lungs.
I cough up new species of joy and of rage and of all that lies between the living and the dying that is our breath,
Vines rattling deep in my chest, bearing the bones of all the things I’ve not yet been,
A soaring space where all that is is pious
And the simple fact of being is all that’s needed to belong.