"swim lessons"

I'm so lucky I know
more about myself than I knew before
all this. I'm so lucky I could cry,
or die
happy,
or just sleep like a baby
who knows what truth is.
I'm so lucky I know as a cold, hard fact what love is,
and was, and could have been. Too deep
for doubt, leaving second thoughts
not a chance to creep in,
on the far side of faith with no leaps left to take.
All grown up and under control, with my destiny
in my hands and I won't have to grow old,
to find enlightenment. Here it comes
and for once, I'm not fighting it.
I'll be a Buddhist in a minute.
Or at least, I'll find out what the river means
with me in it. I'm going to learn
to go with the flow
and everything else I need to know. You swore
you'd teach me to swim, didn't
you?

NO MATTER WHAT

No matter What
Miracles you see, preserve

Your skepticism, against
all
eventuality.

to negotiate away

It is almost always worth it

to negotiate. There are mountains
and chasms and rivers within us,
and the maps we've drawn up
or we've each been given
don't line up - or they may not

work with the ones
that others have. Or perhaps
yours are just too folded up, re-folded
wrong, dog-eared, worn
as hats,
and origami'd into airplanes, place mats,
repurposed in all sorts of creative shapes,
the letters and directions all chafed
and worn off, from too much good use
to be used anymore as maps.

You have to negotiate

each path, ford and crossing,
with your own eyes
open, wide and see

that the other is with you. The only way

it can ever not be worth it
to negotiate,

is where the other person's not willing
to negotiate it with you.
And at that point, sure,
you must give up. You
can't ford a river together
against one of your wills. The rushing water

alone

is enough, without
trying to push past that.
So you're better off to face
the rushing water

alone.

If one of you decides it's not worth it, then

there will be no way you can spot,
no path you can plot, and
no bird's eye view
will see you

through.

gravity corrects

Everything spins
but gravity corrects, and humanity stands
to see what's next.

"zombies aren't monsters / just departed friends / who know how much better it is / once we end"

There are too many ways
- impossible to point out, since
when you try, each act
seems perfectly innocuous; impossible
to decry

since surely, the way humanity acts
is not intended. But
the press and the weight
of the ways we come down
all at once on each other and continuously,
without relief - it
results in a world where humanity,
in its notice and beneath it,
treats

each of us

monstrously.

Humanity is a monster, or maybe
it's just too easy to see it that way. The way
you live your life, and the way you will
die. You know, you have seen
how badly the living
treat the dead who stay,
in the fictions we pay
for others to make -

it is not so very different
from how all we living
treat those who move among us, visible
but ignored, moving past us
as best they can with open eyes,
downcast.

I think

the only difference may be
some of the living are lucky
enough (or maybe, work hard
enough, or both: maybe they work,
and are lucky enough to find people
who find all that effort congenial)
to find people

who treat you like home. You belong,
to them anyway. Well, that plus - for the living,
the rot is invisible.

I think it can be read as that. Life.
It is an allegory for all kinds of monstrous
things - any alienating condition
that people have, but

deeper than that

is the alienation itself, that comes from being
born.

trapped in a skull
with two eye holes
and little to know
and little to no
reassurance that anyone can, or will
know you.

Who you are inside.

what is inside you

so deep in it can only hide

What is inside you