Reader and the Pages

Words spoken in bar rooms or mixed in passing conversation

Blur the path from clearing to be seen, to be heard

I imagine like we all do

So many pages, uncertain which ones are pertinent

Burn or archive, scroll or tome, passing note or nothing

I hope someone will read the introduction and want the chapters

To keep fingers to dog-ear favorite passages

Underline and footnote, scribble in the margins and laugh out loud

Cry until tear drops smear ink and fire anger 

When someone grows to love another the allowance to stomp over the line 

Trades outrage in sublimation of ego 

That is a love I cannot recall, maybe once, but that place is so retracted by that giver

Cave-in and crumbled into an impossible memory

I need someone to take the time to read me

So I keep writing, hoping for a candle light in this wooden attic

The next hurricane, the gunshots, the cancers

Endurance and I want to be able to depend on another soul

This weight of isolation wondering where I am supposed to reside

The clouded footsteps marking the screams and deepened breaths

I am not certain what a man is entitled, my guess is nothing

No matter the occurrences prior; in comparison to the potential of what could be

There is always a darker darkness, an emptier emptiness

Complaint, commentary are feckless fish wrangling

So it is in this moment I attempt openness and request for a nourishing love

To be read for all that I am like a resonating star of all the energy that is in me

Prepared to be given in the condensed elements of my past as I grow denser in time’s illusion

I offer pages and once I thought I found a reader and the dearness feels like damnation

Knowing what that hope felt like attempting to release, never to control

But there is beauty in the release of wanting, so I attempt

As best this human can do for now, unread