on not writing

Finding time is a carving knife: hack deep and away at meat corners. Pull delicate skin from fat and cut. Five trim minutes here. Eighteen minutes there. One straight thinking hour is ripping up, close to bone. Into cavernous ribs. Snap them apart one by one or all at once, long curved keys flying off a broke piano. One that is wrong or refuses sound. Crack down anyway, you try and try your slippery tries to grasp odd calcified shapes. They aren't good; at times awful: thick buried noises, rambling trauma. Fling them to walls, heaped membrane and mess.

There was one uncomfortable instant between gluttony and pride when I just did it. Struck straight down into muscle and tore something out. Twisted my brain into the cage, the inhale crushing, and wrote up. It beat beat beat, weak thing bled beet red.

3:14 life

there's something about 3:14 life
when your small children breathe by your side
in a dark room
when, you are the only soul on earth awake

to coax the rattling in their lungs quiet
distress of their dreams
asleep by the skin of your light fingers
along the hair of their brows
down the softness of their chins

you feel special magic to heal them
for the time being and also for the times
when their warm bodies are long and you reach
and they reach but do not meet