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The Channel My River Flows
pct - 02/21/02

Your wagon wheels have left ruts in my bones. My heart is oozing stripes of red from the tracks of your bitter boots where you carelessly scraped your hatred along my open wounds. Life upon life, your passing left its mark, deepening the ruts and tracks, digging deep the channel where my river now runs. I am drowning in its blood-filled courses, where I have given my marrow to its surging flow... A small pea crying from the pit of an endlessly growing cavernous space. Swimming in your leavings... clutching your scent... I look upward to walls grown ever higher, and narrower and wonder... Why? How did this come to be? I ask your hatred... why? How can I climb these towering, narrowing walls? Will my tears erode them, slowly, inexorably? Is there hope? Oh, I long to leave the bloody vein behind... To stand once again at the top and breathe in freedom, Reclaim the power to make a new choice... And reform the landscape of my living. But... if I succeed in scaling the impossible towers, and find you waiting at the top with sword and hatred still... what then? Your disdain left grooves in my soul. And now I forever play the same notes... Hope Terror Pain Death Life upon life I live a hiccuping, four-note song. Grinding and droning the river sweeps me along in its channel toward the inevitable miserable ever-after, where it waits to start again. Hope Terror Pain Death until I think perhaps... madness? ... and would laugh to welcome the change. How can I scale these walls, and heal these grooves, so deeply cut into my flesh and bone and soul? I bleed bitterness. I breathe hopelessness. Easier to fly than to turn the channel my river flows in. And you... Broken as you are... Have you conquered this Everest? Do you look down on me now, from stony heights with scorn? Do you hold me to blame for the broken record I have become? Or do you finally (finally!) at long last (ah god, please) understand? Let me feel you ... Hold still and do not breathe. Show me all. ALL. Stay and listen to my tears. And perhaps... I might believe you have found your heart. And if you have... Oh love, if you have... Then reach your hand and wait... I will be there. By and by.

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