one thing
about surviving
certain heavy handed
childhood lessons
you never shake
is the echoes
that reverberate
in the silence
pointing out
the similarities
in what was carved
from innocence
and what is said
with careless disregard
in the quiet times
when you are almost
keeping it together
the affirmations of
the long red lines
burning in the cool
sleepless nights
no matter how far
a restless soul
might travel from
those places of pain
it takes very little
to put you right back
in the shaking frame
flinching at shadows
with the knowledge
this is what you
truly deserve

the ocean has
no need for another
grain of sand
yet in the avarice
of the sullen waves
it takes great
mouthfuls with each
crashing upon
the mindless shore
and i know that
the ocean hides
its fair share of
bloated corpses
still i feel the
currents tugging
at my tired legs
as the seagulls scream
at my vacancy
as i struggle against
an internment in these
white cap disasters
uncertain if i am
just another poor soul
bobbing in the riptide
or if i am still
that stupid little child
quivering beneath
a sagging mattress
as my ragged pulse
sings of sweet surrender
in the siren call of
callous reminders to
callused hearts that
sought rampant destructions

navigating minefields
with a drunken confidence
that beguiles shaking
artificial limbs
the best parts of myself
scattered across the
pockmarked landscape of
traumatic battles waging
an innocent extinction
through the war torn
dissonance where hope
is another weapon used
to inflict insidious
tortures in time with
the oscillations of a
bipolar heart leaking
radioactive waste into
the ground soil as the
cacophony of voices
homogenize into a slurry
of pointed reminders
every word spoken in
sullen anger carries more
than a passing amount of
undeniable honesty and
in the end all that will
remain is a scar on the
pristine soul of beauty
and jagged lines from
the echoes of travesties
in bloody clouds that
call the sharks for
an easy feast of
floating flotsam leaking
unimportance to defile
the golden glow of
an indifferent dawn