Algae Bloomed On The Face Of The Lake At Summer’s Height, Like Zits In Bundles Of Thick And Slimy Green.

I seldom love those I admire. What is there to hold in the greats? Achievement sits on the shelf while a lover rests under my bed covers, I cannot converse with trophies though their gold sheens are beautiful, they are empty things. I need a mess, I need something to fill my aching hands so full I could never hope to grasp it all. Keep me busy, keep me warm. That is all I ask of the one I love.

The Wolf

Most are familiar with the story of the wolf in sheep’s clothing: The sly predator posing as prey to descend on the flock and eat them as they are none the wiser. But the story is remembered all wrong, the wolf didn’t have to wear sheep’s clothes at all. He stood before them as a wolf, with claws pointed, canines jutted, and eyes round in their deep, black middles, and simply said, “You are wolves, too. Wolves are better than sheep. Stronger than sheep. You are not sheep.”

Foolishly, they agreed. “I am better than the others, so I must be a wolf,” they thought. And so the wolf ate the sheep, one by one. Where normally they herded together and protected each other, they stood idly, wrongfully unafraid. They had forgotten that what hurts one of them, hurts all of them. They preferred to be better, to think they were wolves, and wolves don’t eat other wolves—only the less than, only the sheep.

And what do you think happened, as the last sheep stood in the glade, and the wolf approached him with grin bloodied and eager? “My brother,” the sheep said smugly, a moment before he was eaten alive.

You weren’t there on the mountain

when its last glacier melted,

You weren’t there in the river

when it’s water ran empty,

You weren’t there by the ocean

when it’s body rested over much of the land.

You didn’t watch the dying happen, but nonetheless, it happened. And one sunny day, when the skyscrapers stand hollow, and the cars don’t run, and the world’s heart has beat its last,

You won’t be there.

What is love but the desire to feel sunlight through their skin. And hold there.

It does not matter the school you come from but your passion for your subject. There are private school boys who have never lived life, slept through it as it is but a dream to them who will never know the endless strife of the girl from nowhere trying to make it in this world on grit and determination alone. No money in her pockets to cushion her falls and catch her when she is pushed back from the gates of academia. Only the belief that she will get back up; propelling her like north wind on a shanty sail.

What sort of torture is it to know what one has done wrong and know deeper so that it can never be fixed? Must ever inadequacy be magnified, extracted, and plastered in the infant space beneath my eyelids?

Though yellow grass grows

She wanders barefooted, on dry and cutting blades

Something has died here, in the glades of her old memories

Its terrain water-hungry, fertile with long-lost mistakes

Sweet aroma of morning dew has forsaken this place.

But she returns, like sunken ship to lighthouse unmanned,

though only yellow grass grows in her past.

There is an understanding in burning high rises that only it’s occupants can gather—that the rapid footsteps and baited breath do little for longevity if the staircase is ash and the elevator an oven.

No, the hurried panic is not for survival of the body, but a hunt for another. A body heat almost indiscernible undulating between the flap like flames—like pop ups out of a picture book. You may think it madness to seek heat in a fire, but this is a heat of the soul, a desire to die in embrace. To know a heart beat’s breath against your own.

An understanding that if life must be unkind, you must never let it be alone.

Maybe I am not good enough for most things, and I am meant only to look at all I want and yearn so deeply that my body begins to die.

On friendship:

When I spend time with you all, I feel a ball of light pool in my weary palms.

The weight in my shoulders, the tightness in my jaw, releases like smoke out of my lungs.

I can breathe again, I can laugh again.

I take the light home with me, and it isn’t so dark there anymore.