Habit

I’ve always meant to do no harm;
But I see a break in your defense.
The knife goes in; my moral alarm
Won’t go off for hours hence.

I never meant to see you by
The wounds I widen with my words;
And I never thought about the reasons why,
But I find safety in what hurts.

Ambiguous

I can’t be the same for everyone,
And that’s something no one understands
As they tell me just to be myself
And give the facts within my hands.

But the truth is how it is presented,
And I don’t know which way is right;
All I know is that I’m drowning,
And my instinct is always flight.

I want to rage and boil
I want to drag you down
I would rather be an ocean
If it meant you’d feel how much I drown

I want to storm this placid beach
And tear the shifting castles down
I would give up bumbled human speech
If I could show how false your crown

I want to hiss and bubble over
I want to make you see
But if we let our depths bring others lower
We’d all live beneath the sea.

I once stepped beyond the pale
To find out what I missed;
It only was a different veil
Of the same hellish mist.

Missteps made half purposefully
Brought horror to them all;
Yet still the only path I see
Going forward, is to fall.

Fear tells me that I should run
And I obey; yes, I obey
It tells me what should not be done
And what I say; what can I say?

Every word’s a loaded gun
So go away; just go away
Fear tells me that I should run
And I obey; yes, I obey.

I am sorry for the late reply
I live a day, and then I die
And some of you may wonder why
But it’s just another day in the cycle of a mayfly.

photo-1549548763-124aafbe2601

We reach out for the words
When we don’t know yet what they are;
When they’re merely instinct on the edges,
The twinkle of a star.

We reach out for the words
And we try to catch them quick;
But alas! there goes another,
For words are always quick to slip.

Credit to my sister, whose words started this poem.