The words of encouragement which you write
are a whispered song behind a wall so tall and wide, so tall and wide.

I see you through a fog, thick and dense.  This place of isolation,
this bubble of unfeeling, is not my permanent residence.

(I tell myself this, with the sincere pat on the back)

I hold a knife to my own throat, I choke.

Oh, I've got something to share, believe you me.
( I laugh, as the words slip out my mouth, slide to the floor)

What a joke!

Just tell me this, how do you save yourself when the hole you've dug
is so comfortable and warm, and the wall so tall and wide, so tall and wide?

i stood apart under the weeping willow and looked out across this river of separation.
there you were, on the other side, lost in your own contemplation.

the wounding arrows of your youth held you fast to your bank,
and i cried alone, in the shadows of my yesterday.    

weren't you always there on the other side wanting me to cross over to you?
and wasn't i always here on these banks, waiting to hear your call?


had we plunged bravely into the swirling eddies of these dark waters,
we would have found the safe passage of our journey,
the warm current of belonging to one another.

she wanders alone down gritty streets
paved in the good intentions of her idealism.

these roads, marred with the holes of remorse
for all her failed attempts at living,
have led her,
in stumbling,
broken paced fashion,
to the realization that her life has
been a series of ineffective day trips.

she never had a destination in mind,
only bumbled along on a journey marked
simply by the passage of time,
and the graying of her hair.

before it is too late,
i want to speak to you from the tender places inside,
from my quiet islands that sing the lonely breezes when the moon shines in her fullness.

but, oh, these tangled vines of my interior keep me strangled in silence.

how can i break free, when my voice is stifled by these twisted branches of my past,
and my hands are bound by the overgrowth of too many neglected years?

i want to cut them out, to be free from their grasp,
to cultivate a new garden upon the fertile soil of these fallow fields.