looking for a vocation

so today was a busy day. an anxious one. i put some stuff out there, for reading, for sharing, for failing. what happens when i fail? do i keep writing, trying to make a life from it? how long do i keep going? what other lives can i even imagine for myself?

so i'm going to share something i wrote today:

Disintegration, as an act of Nature

I. Stasis

Several times he gave her
time and space.
Brilliant scientist, he,
able to so mold physics
wood water earth fire. Air
twisted like braids around her tongue
so kelpy and brown as to choke her
but what words
could she have said
anyway.


II. The Catalyst

A fish, mottled back, dying
as it moved into thinner water,
higher, purpler,
more surreal. His skin
soughs from his body,
his body half dead,
but the living half moves
with purpose.
I lost sight of him amidst the white stars
riding the current downstream,
the thousand reflected lights
that travel over and around him
as he goes the other way.


III. Change, Death

Basement steps, concrete, railless, invitation
for a fall, a broken, a bloody. (The light always seems to be at the bottom of the stairs, so that you must make haste lest your ankles be grabbed by darkness, fingering you from beneath the stairs. Don’t dawdle.)
Moonlight doesn’t reach
the recesses of this room,
as you reach up to pull
the string.

Carving skin from my body,
I take one cut, here,
perhaps I need stitches but I
want this angle and will call
the doctor later. My muscles ache.

I am only not thirty but
my knees throb, my self
deteriorates. Movement
seems to help my circulation
circulate poison, a grey lead in my blood that hurts,
hurts my back, my calves, my deep inner ear where
black centered is my question:
What am I? Candle, burning,
burning energy, fasting monk, terrible hurricane,
swirling tacitly indiscriminate, faster
faster
glass burns how hot?
A rounded gravitational slop, closing in on itself,
spun, spun into no longer liquid.
Perchance to burn, to jump into
kiln breaking away from self too hot to
keep those repressed bonds.
I sigh. But will the heat alight my lashes? Melt my
eyes? See, friend, careless, one. Are we
all we are? Bread baking, burning, breathing in
seeds, wheat growing in fields, blowing
in soft undulating tongues of westerly wind.
Lick lick, flick almost there
Almost… almost… oh,
Oh, I shudder I wonder how I release myself
into this second, this powerful, brimming
Skin. Person.

Moving is unthinkable,
a chasing dream, where the body will not respond to the mind,
the moment of death when
I see! This body is not moving anymore. It is decrepit.
It is crumbling,
What was once shaped and fired and useful
is buried in the sand.
Extinguished.
Shards.


III. The Possibility of Reintegration

Drinking selling persevering, a market of shoutful greets,
Money passing under tables
between my legs, over others working bodies,
Pained toil. Costs. Heaving
at the behest of king King, who breathes fire like dragons,
killed seven in one blow.
A teardrop crown a severed head a pine tree each part of his
bedroom décor,
A rape, a pillage, an addiction to loss
to pain, to recovery. An addiction to asking,
to dissatisfaction.
The lungs are soot black but pumping, the breath is held, discharged,
irrelevant. Some energy takes days to travel, to reach
its destination, and is passed by light, which
goes much faster. Some energy is expensive, and dear,
some destroys the very routes it travels, electric and chaotic,
waking fissures and mortality.
Paralyzed, but green, how is it that something so
Infertile is so lovely? There can be no cause and effect,
No contribution, no memory, even, of this growing green thing
That disappears too soon, leaves nothing, not even