2021.14 Rank and File

Image by @DianaVanDamme from @artstationhq

I do not want to write a love poem.
My walls crumbled twelve months ago,
desert winds blowing a blast of superheated
malice to strip me to my core.
They had always been there,
circling, twisting, piling drifts to
Trickle into my foundations through every
crack; they were the reason for the walls,
after all.

(I wonder about my foundations.
About who cracked them in the first place.
Whether they were built crooked,
or whether it was only nature taking its course.)

I do not want to write a love poem.
I want to soothe my bleeding, sand-burned
surface, submerge in cool waters,
trust my weight to kindly, liquid fingers.
But I was not made to float,
must fight to the clinging surface, gasping,
too stubborn to drown, too unwieldy to glide,
ill-equipped to strike for mist-thick shore.

(I wonder about the weight of sand,
the stone in my bones,
the fire that will not let itself go out,
for fear of never reigniting.)

I do not want to write a love poem.
I do not want to wade through every element
in search of some meaning,
patterns neat and replicable,
inscribing something mirroring truth,
reversing my fortunes in the name of normalcy.
I will seek hope, bright in the margins,
because the only thing that seems clear to me
is what I can never have.

I’ve been trying to follow my own prompts. And you know what? I managed to snooker myself with #14. Turns out I did not want to write a love poem. So, in the end, I followed the advice I often give other writers, which has worked for me in prose before: I lampshaded it. Sort of. I can’t tell if this is finished, and, in a way, it doesn’t really matter. Not this month.

Okay, look, it’s basically like this: I went looking for “misty lake” images, but Google thought I was still looking for TV Tropes, and before you know it, The Lady of the Lake turned up, and she was so angry and gnarly, and unlike any image I’ve ever seen of Nimuë that I thought: Yeah, okay!

Image by @DianaVanDamme and downloaded from @ArtStationHQ.