The Cellar-Door Curse

Destiny! Hearken to me!

No. Not mine, certainly

It sounds so shrill and resonate as a young infant cry,

But is it a straight line? Superimposed by God, the devil, and an ant crossing my path?

The picture looks like a mirage

Cloudy and windy and cold,

Lighting a solid path to go back home.

They say that your gift is ready for you once you

Are ready to grow into it,

But what if you can never truly grow?

you keep shedding and leaving your house of whittled bone like a curdled grave,

Feverish from your work

Endlessly grinding,

But you know you will meet your end at the green-light Elysium,

Weathered and taught like one stretched leather over an unsettled skeleton,

Screaming silently at a loud void that echoes a canceled out nothingness back.

Floating eyes above a heavenward

Cellar-Door

The most beautiful set of words ever known to man, to hear or visualize in your mind’s-eye,

It has cursed me and yet given me the impressive boon

That has bequeathed my fettered slumber, my slump, the tear that slipped inside of me since before my birth

Cellar-Door

You monstrous compendium, you mean to mock me

To taunt me,

To greet me

With your sonorously eloquent etiquette

And quiet loneliness,

Cellar-Door

Why won’t you bring me back to the house of bone where I

Am sorry, so endlessly

Painfully

Sorry

For the pain you feel

And how each year it only takes

And never gives?

They say your gift is ready when you grow into it,

But what if you start before you

Learn how to use the mud on your feet

And the fast-paced skip in your chest

The blood gushing to your inner hips

And paint

Cellar-Door

As a curse all over your face

To truly let in the gift

To understand that

Time and death and gifts and writing and art and war

Is all the same

It’s all alone

Lonely

And free.