BACKWARDS
I’m a preemptive time traveler.
I don’t need reminded that life is fast.
I don’t need reminded that time is short.
I don’t need convinced that you can’t go back.
I live my days through the rearview mirror,
As if they’re past and I’m back
For one moment more.
I don’t live the first time;
I relive the first time
Like I have a second chance
That no one ever has.
Sometimes I’d like to travel less.
GALAXIES
I’ve gathered my exterior
Exudes far less than the truth
And other than I’d think.
I’ll never know how swirling depths,
Vast passions,
Unreached galaxies,
And every emotion under the sun
Can be hidden in introverted silence
And presumed as emptiness—
Or worse, ambivalence.
This world I live day in day out
Is roaringly real to me
But silent to the onlookers,
It would appear.
So it begs the question,
You who I assume to be just you:
Are roaring galaxies inside you too?
FIRE
I am a roaring fire that people shield their eyes from.
Some look so far away that they forget there’s a fire at all.
The colors are so bright, it’s easier to not look than try to grasp the glowing.
The burning gets so hot, it’s more comfortable to step away.
They’d rather freeze in familiarity of cold, damp darkness
Than let
any part of their heart begin to thaw in the glow of something they don’t know.
Warmth,
blazing colors, sudden sounds are terrifying in their unfamiliarity—
Terrifying
as they threaten the certainty that cold, damp, silent darkness is the only way
to live,
Beginning to pull one tiny thread that maybe there is another way, that there is deeper, that there is more,
And that maybe the fire isn’t strange but the darkness is.
And that
thread could unravel a life-long blanket of protection from living anything but
a flat-lined life.
They would rather live in nothingness than live a life on fire.
So it’s far easier to look away … pretend there is no fire at all.
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