Look into my eyes. Is there nothing there that you recognize?
Am I dead? Did I drown?
Did you lay me in the ground with a napkin on my mouth?
Was it hard, mother, to see your first try at living a life that was full of kindness fall into the murky darkness of depression where the only consistency was a lack of conscious ambition?
Did it hurt, father, to watch your hero drown in a river of loneliness and fear where the current has no direction while you stared out your mirror?
Did you cry, siblings, as you watched your brother swing from the ladder of self restraint only to fall face first into the hard unforgiving stench of self defeat and depravation.
The only reason you brought that napkin is to make sure I could speak no more to your humiliation.
The only reason you prayed was to overpower the sounds of my hollow justifications.
I don’t blame you. I would join you if I wasn’t the one with this animal trap ripping into my skin.
But I’m awake, I’m not sleeping.
Or is this dream just a stream of older things predigested and reconstructed?
Did my humanity end along with my ability to retain? Since there is little to retain when your in a box underneath the ground.
Or is this something new that neither of us know what to do with?
Is there a chance that bones can breath?
Or is that just a fairytale’s dream that only a maniac could believe?
Some believe they could blot out the sun if they only filled the air with their screams.
We call them stars to reflect their futility.
I would be scared too if I saw a corpse come out from underneath. I would look at me like you did the night I came back.
I remember the questioning glances, the awkward sentences. The hurried chuckles at unworthy stanzas.
But I also remember falling in love.
The heart that never knew a beat found blood sweetening the darkest creases.
The eyes lost in darkness felt their glaze dissipate and focused on something.
And it felt like life breathing.
All compasses lost their meaning as the worlds spinning finally caught up to me and I realized what singing was meant for.
Laughter, peace, joy….meaning.
I came alive not for a feeling, but so that I could feel.
But it wasn’t all good.
How long had I been running?
Sobriety hit harder than a prince backstabbing his king.
All the things I had hide underneath the fog of relief came out and showed their teeth.
And I realized how long I had let those teeth grow.
I thought that you would be glad. Your son had come back from the dead.
But my skin wasn’t the right tone and my voice had grown too loud.
I guess I threatened the silence that you had worked so hard to protect.
I was left to the street again.
But this time was different because other men knew of sickness and wanted to be involved in the treatment.
I found a kind of sweetness that all logic contradicted and demeaned.
I didn’t know if it was for a season or if these new trees would stand the storm of my senselessness.
I was a new born beast after all.
But time has shown the density.
In all my life I have never known friends with such beauty as those marked with the most impurity.
Now I call them family.
I thought that tameness was expected. A sort of domestication that would rid me of the inclinations that breath through the iris’s hidden behind these speculations.
But instead I found everything I had ever wanted.
It’s interesting how, just like leaves, we are here to show different shades of the same tree.
So now I live.
Though based on these scenes, when viewed chronologically, I still feel deceased.
I understand why you still try to cover me like you did with those suffocating beams.
But can’t you see that all those dreams finally became a reality?
That what was meant for benefit me was not the antidote, but the detriment that caused me to choke.
But it was all used to bring me low so that I’d be buried with my darkest foes and be risen to a life of hope.
Look into my eyes. See that I don’t blame you. I’m awake, knowing now that bones can breath. I can love through the pain of feeling. It won’t be all pleasant and I know the streets are there. But truth has proven too dense to let me die without living.