These nights (written 12/10/2011)

I’ve had heavy nights where I fell the gravity pull my soul down into my body condensing it thick at the bottom of my heart until it spills out into my lungs and I’m coughing myself up. These nights my thoughts escape the dungeons of my brain brandishing swords made of ghosts screaming of nightmare memories, surrounding me, capturing my peace and replacing my blood with questions I thought I once had answers to but that I lost in the translation of becoming a man.

I shake and convulse as I fall through the floor and forget the space I’m in trying to grasp on to the little bit of strength I have but canyons form beneath me running rich with rivers of trials. Desperate to swallow me like a ship in a storm the ocean pounding like my heart. I can hear my grandmother in the river telling me she will beat her cancer so she can hold my children in her arms. Her eyes there and gone, innocent and simple like Christmas lights on a tree. So beautiful that they need only exist to know the secrets of the universe. I can feel the road escaping me beneath the wheels of my car where inside I take home a friend. The night so wrong, his house no longer his home, his mom no longer his mother. I still know exactly what it is like when my chest collapses and my bones surrender. The way my heart crawled into itself where it cried knowing that I had let my love down. Every muscle that it took for her to frown condemning me to a black box where words and light have never existed because there was never anything worth hearing, never anything worth seeing in that darkness I’ve filled with these empty thoughts of divorce, damnation and death. I don’t feel these pasts, I remember them. Their life was cut away from them, a knife slicing through the middle removing any words from my mouth any sound from my ears. 

It is these nights that beauty is taken hostage and men can become mortal again. Where dreams most die and the world spins slightly slower to let you catch up to it. These nights when I see the world through my brain, cold, systematical, and alone in a flawed and dystopian life. It’s these nights when I decide I want to spend the rest of my life seeing through my heart.