Healer

I.

I once had a kid tell me he would die for love. Sixteen years
& he had already decided to give into the self-sacrificial
rite, trading the legality of a forgotten instinct for a hallowed
faith that goes against everything it means to preserve. It
broke my heart just enough to know that the gentle sector
of his soul that would stop for nothing became a figment,
strapped to the walls of some glorified imagination. But I
know nothing, don’t I? The fragile laws of his conscience are
a science I will never comprehend. So I pack up this fear in
eleven pieces of luggage & collapse them in the abyss that locks
the quiet days within my mind. I pray to be different. & sheets
of ice hang against the faces of my inhibition, cataloging
in each minute thaw the hollow sense that there is so much
more I must know, for to believe that love is always becoming
less of yourself is to

                                                                        let go.

​

II.

Memory proves that pain is a casualty of survival, yet to say
that this synapse of a feeling is the same as the subliminal
indulgences of time would be to forget everything I have ever
tried & failed to tell you. Whereupon you reach the precipice
that holds memory and dream equal, you must ask yourself
how much of this rugged mind belongs to the drumming in
your veins. How different are you from the velvet-worn web
you craft your heart each time it falls apart? Healer, they say.
Call it survival all you want, but the cradle is home & that must
be better than a fire against the cold. So delicate, you rest
against the test of idle framework; a sleeve for your dreams so
they can sleep as the bones of this wall break against the wind
instead. The forgiven years are written in the recesses of the
vacant fog & finally, you are not the same. You are loved
by a mind you couldn’t know

    before.