And I 

with chalk in my mouth

and fear cradled close, my infant, my heart 

wait for you here in the crush:

violent, moontossed, 

a green that fades to grey then black.

Sing me your verses. 

My counterpoint is dull, delivered

in an exhale of grime, halo around my mouth

where the chalk 

and carbon and salt and ice 

balloons out, crest of a tideless moan.

I fall silent.

Feverish and full of anxiety

for all the ways you will hurt me, my blood

seizes the chance to escape.

Lunar, waning, I am a trough,

hollowed for your words and your nails.

After awhile all I can see is the ways in which you are with someone comparable or incomparable to me

I thought to try peace, once, and
returned to you, chastened, a helpmeet;
but you laughed at me and

said i could never be anything i am not.
windburned, seaborne, I am more vessel

than captain, more belly than prow.
in that long, grey trek I thought to follow you

back home, or past home, back up

to dry land or the beacon of your face.

i could never have succeeded.

I thought if I held a course I might steady, but 

creatures of the swell do not stay still.

I idle now in the trough 

and return the slow, blank stare of the water 
in the rising wave.

I have missed my own voice, the only authentic crop I've ever grown. Even the words cannot be mine, are only borrowed, mined from someone else's cairn. At best I am a colonizer, a parasite, a vacuum for all the worlds that are not mine. I recycle your dust, and call it coal. I compost your dreams and call them hope.

Please, see me. I am entirely without future.

Ink on the sheets, lightning in the sky.

The amber heat of you, lit

in the fervency of your fear. In this moment

I cannot pick a battle with you at all.

Ink on my skin, lightning in my mouth.

Your ego and I, we conspire. We lay traps

you will never see. I glow,

hot, caged in the iron grip of your stress.

I twist in the veins of your light,

dust motes in the dark swirl where you turn

away from me, tired, afraid.

Ink on your skin, where I drew myself in.

Your hate, in the dark, is low

and rolls deeper than the thunder. 

I am strong. I will leave you, come morning.

I have been gathering the pebbles for years (sandy point, hocking hills, lakeshores, dunes, that cave in the Pennsylvania mountains) so that when I do decide
to walk the waves, finally,
the decision will require no second guessing. I am too well prepared, I have earned this moment over and over again for years.

You'll get old and there will be no one left to protect

The weather will turn and you'll be alone with your words