She said “You don’t want answers you’re just looking for a reason to need them.”
And that right there pulled me out of my trance, and replaced my awe with something like “Huh?”
I forget that people don’t know what they’re talking about.
They have to talk in third person cause they don’t know themselves very well.
How do you tell someone there’s more to life than taking your clothes off? Like putting them back on.
You don’t.
So I roll over to take a sip of my tea and speak to her in the only language she understands,
“Baby you are free to be as hopeless as you like. You could be air… and I am free to be the sea.”
Because I learned somewhere along the way, the point wasn’t to save the world, the point was to save yourself… but you end up saving the world anyways
Because that’s just the way it works.
So I let her be lost.
I let her be cold and indifferent.
Because I knew that you could only be lost, cold and indifferent for so long until you start to seek heat.
Once she was so turned around, she couldn’t tell up from down —
So free she couldn’t tell the ivy from the trees —
Once the frost got deep inside and numbed her bones into a lullaby
She would start to care too much.
Far too much.
And she would start to itch —
looking for a light
Until her skin was raw from itching and started twitching
And her body and soul would rattle and roll
like two stones throwing blows,
striking against each other until she sparked
And she would be left with no other choice but to set herself on fire, and light her own way.
Cadence Collective: Long Beach Poets 