You provoke
I provoke
Push and pull
Until someone breaks
Who’s at the helm
Who’s fighting whom
Is it your ancestor or mine
Vying for survival
Where does our love go
When our history floods through
Stream of Consciousness
ancestry
Legacy
I feel you there
All the hearts of those before me
Your dreams are in mine
Or are my dreams echoes
Of what you imagined for yourselves
I want to be what you could not be
Do what you could not
Live more fully
More freely
Give those who’ll follow me
Dreams less encrusted
With the pain of the past
Create a new narrative
Of True Love and Joy
Give the future a love that will last
Traveling On
I hear you
My constant companions
Some whispering, some insistent
All desperate to be heard
Reaching from behind to steer me
Safely through the world
A world you did not survive
I hear you
I do
But I must find my own way
Must live new mistakes
And leave this world
Having lived new ways of being in it
I hear you
I do
And I say
Thank you
And I say
Goodbye
Soul Echoes
Who’s there, yearning, in pain
In the dark of my past
I look behind and see
The silhouettes of the many
From whose dreams I was born
I feel their unrealized needs
In the needs of my present
What they have not let go of
Holds me now, outside of my life
I see you, I say
I’m sorry, I say
This is yours, I say
I lay their burdens at their feet
Look them deeply in their eyes
Thank you for dreaming my life
I’ve got it from here
Blank Page
The legend of me
Changes daily
Sometimes hourly
Sometimes rooted in the past
Sometimes projected into the future
Sometimes whispered, often shouted
I have allowed ghostwriters
Free reign for far too long
Time to write my own story
I know it best, after all
Gonna get quiet and listen
For the voice that is my own
Inheritance
I hear their screams of silent disapproval
Feel their arms, clutching me, holding me back
“Don’t go out there. You’ll die. It’s not safe for us.”
My belly’s a stone
Ingested before I was born
I’ve tried to throw it up
Doesn’t budge, it’s mine now
I carry it with me
This inheritance
This heavy key to the past
This memorial to those before me
This museum housing their lives’ dreams and losses
Maybe it’s not something to pass
Like a kidney stone
Or to be removed like a cancerous growth
Perhaps I need only to lovingly lay it down
At the feet of those whose dreams I am now living
Perhaps their burdens are not mine to carry
But mine just to remember, and know
As I move forward into my own life’s dreams and losses
To be remembered, one day, and known
By those who come behind me
Beyond the Skinny Branches 