You can’t conceive of anything different, carrying to term ebbs and flows of life. Outward mobilities.
How to extend a hand?
How to grab an outstretched hand while exhausted, treading water?
Somehow the glow, safety and care, threatens more than cold horrors lurking below.
You’d rather not know.
Drowning, now.
Inaction is action for the gently indifferent, indecision a decision, nothing a terrible something.
Don’t be a stranger
Well, I’ve been hibernating
Staring at these broken wings
More pitiable, really, than the bush turkey I’ve seen
with one black feathered wing dragging
his shadow shroud, burden unallaying
His feet still work.
The claws that build and tend his mound
take him where he likes to go.
You’re a modern Dionysius;
madness, masks, vanity—divine.
Followers, slaves to worship
a golden god
of endless ritual.
When you stare lifeless
into that broken mirror
the shards of the made-up
can never hurt you.
Be nice to Alec, he’s
had a hard life.
Two bug eyes, facing up,
proboscis made of
hair, extended down
past slender shoulders and
wide hips.
A whisper in a hidden
corner, there he is.
Picking up the dead houseflies,
dissolving. Reforming.
The endless life cycle.
Outside, Alec is there, of course,
mirage-coded, he holds a green leaf in
his spindly fingers.
Brown, decayed now, it crumbles,
crumbles, a leaf pile
piled high, the dead
cleansing fire from Alec’s endless miseries
flickering ember, catches clothes. Reminding.
Life’s inevitable gravity pulls us down—
Alec’s mottled grey skin, waving arms.
He must feel a chaos gently.
Butterflies, are made, to flutter by,
and die, quickly, to live so bright
though just to die.
Back inside, houseflies have died, again.
Back to bed, to read, write, draw—
the good it seeps into hollow edges
Alec knows it sings elusive.
Rolls back in and out,
a warping tide, an endless life,
a secret’s out. Alec passes
by the lanterns, sparking regardless,
where Alec goes, the light is not
needed.
Back in the garden, the apples
nestle in the leaves. A serpent
spirals, curls around the flickering
brown leaves, burnt to begin again.
I think we might be doomed—
two avoidants circling the abyss
I don’t know
if your outstretched hand
mirror mine
would make me more or less likely to jump
I think what draws us together is
we’re always out of reach
I don’t know
I’m tired
I don’t know anything anymore
Megan Porter Poetry