Sometimes somebody takes their sandpaper hands to caress your tender cheeks until they bleed
Sometimes somebody spends three weeks in a dark dungeon sharpening a stick until they are convinced it has the right shape to pierce your heart precisely
Sometimes somebody spots a loose brick by their feet and as if possessed by some erratic compulsion throws that brick towards your unassuming skull
Sometimes somebody finds a grudge and signs a loyalty contract to feed its insatiable hunger for the rest of their life
Sometimes you are in the wrong place at the wrong time
Sometimes you live there
Sometimes you set one little boundary and a whole army of aggressors marches to the hills of your annihilation
Sometimes you smile kindly and someone takes that auric opening as an invitation to pump their unaddressed misanthropy like an oil spill into the lake of your beautiful day
Sometimes you really didn’t ask for that
Sometimes the person you love most in the world abruptly turns their back and lives the rest of their days as if you never existed
Sometimes you miss them
Sometimes your person dies and every last skin cell you shed continues calling their name forever
Sometimes it doesn’t get better
Sometimes you have to rekindle your will to live with an old thrifted campingaz and a pack of wet matches
Sometimes you can’t imagine that ever going to work
And even still, usually, someone appears on the periphery with a small bowl of warm soup
Someone delivers three slivers of joy in a beige envelope
Someone silently leaves a bag of vegetables on your doorstep
Someone calls continuously through the hard months
Someone touches you
Someone inspires a poem
Someone with kind eyes opens the palms of their hands with anointing oil and asks you, whenever you feel ready, to remove your old and damp attire
Someone waves from the shore of your own life to welcome you back home
Someone holds a candle in a dark hallway
Someone opens a door you finally decide to enter
Someone feels like their heart knows your heart
They read you short stories under a blanket in a language you don’t understand but that doesn’t matter
Someone’s sandpapery hand caresses your cheek and a cascade of neurotransmitters dance like a flutter of butterflies through your entire body
Someone’s skin sticks to your skin like glue
And no matter what you try to do to deny it
Their hand keeps finding your hand even in the dark
Without looking
The way a young tendril on a beanstalk knows where to find the pole that supports its growth
As if encoded by the stars in the imprint of their long lost fingertips
How you quietly really did ask for exactly that
These are the scales of Libra’s relational constitution
The darkness of the human mind knows no bounds, but it is finite
It ultimately pulls the plug on itself
Yes, we may all vanish with it
Yet from this precarious tightrope through time
We can still leap onto someone’s good scales
We are the weighted boots of someone’s belonging
We are the gravitational pull underneath Justitia’s feet
We wash each other clean
And if that is all we’ll ever achieve
Well
That is quite a legacy
Metaphysical Mulch 