Love’s Knife Fight

And wouldn’t you know,
all about
how this is supposed to go—
from shouting fights
and a calendar filled with shouting nights.

Dead ends
that don’t die in your sleep.

Light on a place
that doesn’t respond
to anything I keep—
to the changing seasons,
or how I still answer
with the… “it’s alright”…
that has me falling apart,
but you won’t see it
from the distance of your view.
The people-pleasing,
the self-deceiving—
my knee-jerk response.

And now I see
how pain creates art.
As a little boy, I prayed
that none of the fright
I’d known
would stay the same.

And I’d pray
to hear my mother
maybe once
say my name.

And to my brothers,
lost to the addictions
that tend to rule in our veins.

Like these August nights—
not only leaves were swept
from the dusky eve’s sight.
On roads that always dead-end
before you get far,
sometimes furthest from the truth
is where it’s less hard.
But the stares
start to pierce brighter than the stars.

In a closer space
lives the silence
that won’t ever leave—
wishing they’d never been said aloud again.
It’s bad enough to lie.
And I wonder—
is there really a white lie
when it’s myself I deceive?
(Is it a white lie, if I can’t even breathe?)

And the headlights
are shining in my face again,
highlighting another one of my problems—
they call it sin.
Best judged from another’s tower.
And I’m left praying
with selfish reason:
hear me in my darkest hours.
Does that take the power
from what I say—
or do I mean it more
because of the pain?

Where neither cold nor heat
seems to show in the shower.
Behind mirrors,
from myself, I cower.
From myself,
still underestimating my power.
Like blasting bullets
in love’s knife-fight,
where the blade you know the most
buries the deepest—
and your body spills
more than a crimson tide.
Your eyes dilating
to the size of all the lies—
and I no longer have to pray
to know what it means to be alive.

Even when September ends,
October still begins.
But I no longer have to face the cold winds,
because I’m where everything begins.