Hurry into dawn like you’ve got bullets for wheels. Don’t stop for the smell of your last conquest or the muddled dream of the next one. Your night is full of suitcases refilling themselves as fast as you empty them. You’re racing against an impossible empty promise. Stack as much love as you think you have against the shipping wall and watch it empty out into the bay pushing in at your feet. You’ll never be able to dive deep enough to retrieve your heart. You think it’s there under your skin, in the protection of your ribs and your intention, but it’s gone the way of all the waves before it. It’s gone with the siren call of the moon, shredded itself on the shoals you never saw in the lampless dark.

I can’t say there’s no way through here but I know there’s no way through here today. The myths you’re telling yourself, willing to be true, they fit only half your skin, only half your belief. You know you’re fitting words too precious for life into your fresh mythology. You have to let go for it to find you.

This under-voice of vice is not lying, this remembrance of past ghosts can’t walk paths without your feet. It can’t speak without your tangled language of loss.  It struggles to find itself in unfamiliar dialects but struggles against ocean logic. It struggles to rise up through salt foam and cold wave to bring your memory back to the beginning where you first met yourself.

Rise against the sand and rock, the only place you’ve ever known yourself to bleed true, to blue in frigid water, to stiffen in false twilight. Here is your nest of intention, your nest of sinew and unlit wax effigy. I have only this to give. Don’t burn me until you’re ready to set me free into the horizon of dense fog. I promise to hide whatever you’re not telling yourself today.