Many Times People Treat Enlightenment Like A Concrete State. Like Once They Reach It They Are Above The

I rub the blanket across my cheek, trying to ground myself.

I feel your skin instead burning and intrusive. Grating on me.

I feel like I'm floating. I'm off in a dream.

Experiencing horrors I've already seen.

My breathing is heavy. I try not to scream.

I scrub at my skin. It never gets clean.

I think too much about the stars

Your past is no excuse for your future

They told us to aim for the stars, that even our failures would be rich.

They didn't tell us that in exchange our victories would feel cheap and lifeless.

I have to fail to feel.

What I wouldnt give to feel the static in my limbs again.

For as much as it makes me jump and twitch at least I can move.

For as distracting as my restlessness is at least I am not still.

Not frozen by the empty space between my skin and my bones.

Left hollow by the absence of motivation; Of want for anything.

I am not a beggar

I do not cry from my hunger

I bare down on an empty mouth with gritted teeth

I let holes burn in my stomach before I allow myself to eat

Consumption is a sin

To want is to waste

Like the monks before me, I know I can wait

I eat my sins

I gag from the taste

The more there is

The less I take

Because I know how much it costs

And I cannot pay

It drips and splatters over her forearms. Crusting along each delicate finger joint and congealing where it packed into the curve of each cuticle. Painting her skin gray like the dust of age and time.

It drips onto her shoes and stains the hem of her shirt. It falls in spinning splatters to soak the denim of her jeans in thick drops.

In this mess, she gives birth to something new. There, by the potter's wheel.

Greedy are the trees

"Haven't you ever seen it?" She asked me.

"Gnarled roots pale as bone crawling their way through the underbrush. Pushing aside new green ferns and beds of decaying leaves. Each root peaking for long lengths from the damp dirt. Anchored maybe by the earth or maybe by thorny vines, sharp and thick with red-tipped spines. This is the work of the trees." She whispers this all to me in a conspiring way.

"You'll see them reaching with knothole fists towards the waters edge. Thirsty for what the spring has to offer; as if the ground isn't soft with it already." She pauses smile turned sharp and condescending in the way a mother's does when sharing stories of her child's mischief.

"Greedy things"

I hope I'm one of the things you hold close when your feeling empty

Long ago I accepted that my mind would always outrun my body. It would be an exhausting existence but one I could ultimately cope with. I spent all of my youth studying for it, how to live with my own mind. How to make room for it in my life. I looked it in its wild eyes as it promised it would never be tamed. And that was fine. I swallowed my dread determined to live anyways. To perservere.

I was unprepared for my body to start lagging further behind. I should still be young. Barely an adult. But my body is degrading around me nonetheless My joints creak and ache, my muscles fall slack and weak. I can't carry the weight I could before. I cannot hold a knife correctly to cut my vegetables, I can't even muser up enough strength to stand throughout the day. Always having to stop and catch my breath.

My mind is only getting faster and more unruly as it grows but my body is quickly becoming infirm. I worry the two halves of my existence will pull me apart refusing to live together.

What will become of me when I am abandoned by both?