A Trick of the Light

It is easier to forgive myself for giving up hope than for struggling to find the words to wish it farewell. I would sooner be a poet than a living thing. Still, I breathe.

I want to vomit up all of my hopes and dreams. I want to lay over coals until my pores have secreted the last of my memories. If I could pull my childhood out with the roots of my teeth, I would set to work tonight. If some gland in my body produced hope, I would seek it with bare hands.

But my hope comes from a kind of place I can not touch or even see. When the adept glean auras for friends on New Year’s Eve, they taste from a kind of plane wherein my hope lies.

In the way a candle flame eats the world from the rest of your eyes, my hope is in that false dark.

From where tears come that weren’t there a moment ago, beckoned by a stranger’s kindness, there lies my hope.

And maybe I will rise from the effort, and finally heave a breath, and my hope will leave with the stars when I blink them from my eyes. I will have lent myself, body and soul, to a trick of the light and speech out of static. I will have broken free of the Earth, in all her woes, to spin unhindered for-ever.

Then I will have been as God made me.

And still, the Sun comes around- a little slower each time.