Water

    Water rushes throughout your entire being like anguish up against itself. Your mind reels, wondering about your reactions, wondering why you are so eager to please and so prone to tears. How painful it is to say goodbye; you would almost rather not say hello at all because you cannot fathom how you were looked up after so much time in the first place. What is the meaning of your existence in the eyes of one too many someone elses, and why does it matter anyways what others think about you? They’re generally wrong, and such criticisms are a toxic fertilizer deceiving your heart into breathing deeply only to cough out the heart-ache a few miles down the boulevard. And you don’t know what is worse, the deception, the attempt to recover from the blow, or the tangle of emotions that tear you apart from the inside out. You wonder what it is inside of you that spills so easily and how shall you clean up the mess, each and every time? Is it a horrible mistake to allow a stranger to view your depths and what does it mean when someone known becomes a mere stranger? Ghosts take over the lives of those you resist loving and haunt you like the residue of carelessly applied glue. Some will eat glue in early school years; a sticky attempt to remain faithful to the self. Others manage to spill the glue all over so as to secure lingering deadweights and the guarantee of stagnancy galore. Lack of movement is the cluster of hallucinations that come into effect when view is limited to one wall lacking shape, lacking color. No memory or desire can beat the feeling of importance, of knowing that one fits and is rooted. Landslides crash down the hillside with you as the target, adding fuel to the fire of hypocrisy when what you say is what you veer clear away from doing. There is nothing more harmful than feasting upon self and forgetting the rest of the world. But what is there to do besides worry about the rest of the world, its tastes and reactions, and the complexity of each individual? Each and every one of us creates reactions by way of choice and then we in turn stand back to admire the results that may either implode or expire. The best of times are when absence blossoms and a silent moment grows slick with idea. Time alone burrows away from the dry and greedy sun, requesting two waters instead of one. And even while one voice so close and full of insistent claim drops monotonic through a floorless floor, closer echoes bear witness to appreciation, clasping honor head-on. Number one on any list is trust, for a series of taut backs are oft to be seen fading into a grey horizon that is neither dawn nor dusk. Lies are the juicy middle of endless dream worlds; without beginning or end. Arching into submission, a beam of light twists around to face the enemy of its nonexistent head; the false curl of its sadly unborn tail. No introduction or familiarity is necessary when all that you mean is goodness; rounded like a song in mid-air stretching across an expanse of liquid so dense it makes earth look drinkable. A smile stretched across the pupils consoles the soul by way of closure. Yet, trying too hard is sheer method for transparency, the kind that does not lead to intimacy, but strips away thick bark to reveal deadly mites with needle-point teeth etching away your life story across the back of a towering and yet strangely timid tree. You cease to fight because you come to fear joy itself, sidling over to the companionship of book ends, hollow at center but still standing. To exist as the substance for the support of a structure long since dismissed reminds you of how the familiar becomes so vague in the blind eyes of the weary. A good ways down the road you will encounter a lady on her porch rocking to the rhythm of life itself and rolling with the punches. Resistance feeds the black and blue like how the fight within yourself over yes or no seems to rip out your throat and feed it to the masses. Far better it is to meander apart from the others and trace shadows with your mind’s fingertips. Better to feel nothing at all; to save it all for later when more is safe. Sometimes the enemy has not the right to know or the ability to understand that the pieces of a heart while shattered will always remain close at hand to ride the waves of sweet and delectable pain each time they, together or unescorted, cross one kind of threshold or another. 

    Senses or not, it is kind to be aware. Slowly tasting the heat of a day, you savor and ponder experience before releasing it into the space of pure absence. It is good to keep in mind that most things make no sense whatsoever, especially concerning themes of love (which are all of what makes anything worth-while, either savored for the flicker or the flight). Sentences blend in this night of clashing and clanging and no one beat can agree to link or unlink, to defile or decorate where ground grows soft and water hard on the hair in the green of a day after plenty of words unsaid create stories in your head molding form into fiction and loss into delight...Yesterday you lost something that for someone else was a blessing and the only disguise worn was the cold lack of dismay. Still, two sweets tickled a fancy so in tune with reluctance the warm air bore down and you couldn’t make up your mind, so you merely sat and stared at them as if you were one of them churning with the wind against traffic and shortly prior to the click of a hang-up call. Certain people feel as if they are the hang-up call; that they have been put out like a match in a damp cave. Conversation continues on in your head and that is the most dangerous thing of all. Imagination chases away adoration with a cleaver and mocks all forms of amusement like reading backwards and upside-down in order to open a drawer in the subconscious mind that long ago stuck shut and rusted over. As of yet there exist no handles, and while bare in appearance and completely lacking any apparent function, the wooden contraption has lasted beyond the harsh words and farewells. Your latest lesson in life, whatever it may be, is something to practice frequently and with utter sincerity, as you plough forth into the land of ever-evolving enchantment.

Jennifer Burnside