Buried injustices

Excavate this sadness

All the injustices

Not quite laid to rest

Jump in the graves of them

And exhume the body of grief

For your consumption?

Let’s be clear about what you’re asking for here

In my own time

I tend the graves

Of anguishes past experienced

You, grave robber

Desecrater

Have no right to visit here

It isn’t for me to dredge up the soil

Unearthing it all

Leaving the soil upturned

For what?

For you to confirm

That yes it is legitimate pain buried here?

I’m past that,

Way past asking for scraps

I’ve come to understand

That there’s a reason

You weren’t there for the burial

So when I tend the graves

Of all the injustices

Half buried before

Don’t turn up

In funeral blacks

Facimile fragility

Leaking from your eyes

You didn’t know the deceased

And your abject sadness

Are only theatrics

Done for the optics

More to the point

I don’t welcome it

Leave me to my grief

To the laying to rest of

Anguish and injustice

Stop demanding

That I uncover it

For your voyeurism

And vouchsafing

Be on your way

Stop not at these graves.

There is space for this emotion.

An Unstormable Knowing

One more round with the tempest.

She stands,

arms outstretched

in a daring embrace,

as she locks gaze with the eye of the storm.

---

Energy jitters up her spine,

and her tongue is dry.

She’s danced this whirl wind before.

---

Spun out over and over,

leaving breathless and dizzy,

that’s if she even leaves at all.

---

The tempest calls her name,

blowing temptingly in her ears.

Drawing her in just a bit.

---

One foot forward,

without conscious thought,

she’s already in forward motion,

Pulled in by the deceptive calm.

---

Still the weathered shawl of foreboding

settles on her shoulders,

and her skin pinpricks with that quiet

un-nameable sense,

that something is just out of step here.

---

She’s been around this tempest before,

this isn’t her first spin,

and lately she’s tired

of letting herself be reeled back in.

---

Emotionally battered,

mind windswept,

she’s intimately familiar

with the post-storm landscape.

---

The tempest howls,

the wind buffets at her mind,

the noise is reaching crescendo.

---

She turns inwards to the quiet within.

And asks a single question.

The answer makes steel rods of her legs

and she is at a stand still.

---

The question?

Is this, what you want, for your life?

---

Lightning fizzles

from within the tempest,

aiming at her stock still legs.

There is pain and tingling,

and the metal taste of hot electricity.

As the bolt hits at where she is grounded.

---

Is this what you want for your life?

---

Honestly,

the answer is so quiet,

it’s hard to hear it

beneath the roar of the storm.

---

Still it matters not,

because the answer becomes her vision.

She feels it right in the gaps.

She unstormably knows the answer

in every fiber of her.

---

She is steady as the tempest rolls over.

It flails and roars,

wails and hails.

Steadily drags at her core.

---

It comes with dark

and thunder and shuddering.

Shaky teeth,

and the shivering.

---

The storm is a mighty thing.

The knowing within is mightier still,

and she does not let the storm in.

---

She draws deep from within herself,

The strength to weather it.

At moments her legs falter,

and at times she is almost carried away

by the force of the storm,

still the unstormable knowing is her steadying.

---

The storm does its worst.

The knowing is unstormable.

The tempest passes.

She stands, still.

---

Her arms outstretched in an open embrace.

The storm has subsided.

And faintly in the post-storm ozone

she hears a new question.

What do you want for your life?