pen/sword

It's common:

When you walk away from the casket - after
steeling yourself against the unnatural waxen stillness
of a face you knew in emotion, after noting, from
some morbid need to confirm, the lack of twitching
behind the eyes, after searching for the lipsticked lip-stitches muting the departed eternity
of an empty shell - we imagine the cold-wash terror, morbid
that we are, were were to catch a single flutter; we, ourselves, evoke
the feeling of frigid fluid in our bones, and we breathe it away as we
turn back to the faces of the living, make our solemn processional
through the fragrance of a thousand slain gardens, dead thorns clutched in hand.

It's common: We don't cry for those who have left. We cry
for the survivors. We cry for the supple momentum
of those who collapse a little into the void
left by someone whose existence was, in some way,
pressed side-to-side with our own,
until they weren't.

_________

It is a numbing thing, to give up
when you have to defend everything you say,
or when everyone's words
serve as fodder, as springboards for rebuttal,
for responses or open letters or rebukes.

As a writer, I feel like I'm dying. And it's so much easier
to die a slow death, continue determined dogged
one-foot-in-front-of-the-other, and not offer
a word along the way, as funeral-stitched lips lie still
while I shrink, while I hide myself
in smaller and smaller clothes
and offer nothing
where words
serve as fodder for, or springboards for, or rebuttal against,
or "responses" or "open letters" or rebukes.
It's tiring to read; it's tiring to abstain. The board is tired
against your toes
when what I have
is what broke my heart.

and anymore, it hardly seems worth 

the trouble

when we don't listen much anymore, 

when every word is a weapon, 

when someone out there is, right now, evaluating

these words 

as simplistic stupid whiny ugly childish mumbo jumbo hissy fit

and I'm breathless.

when I say "I feel as though
everything I was before
is dead; I am barely in this body anymore," and
the dreaded emo is thrown out, and
isn't that just the bitch of Pinterest, that
what was, at one time, soul-deep expressions
of genuine devastation
have been turned commonplace, into filtered pictures
of pretty girls lying in groups
in large fields, or roads.

when I say I really don't know
what to call God anymore, and it scares me and
my own instincts clamor with large, leather-bound books
open to pages interpreted to accuse:

postmodern,

individualism,

spiritual-not-religious, 
unchurched. 
not real. not good. not enough. 

I've always had an intact core, always, and
any attack or defense was peripheral in nature. But my core, thirty-odd
years in the making, is beginning to die
of the embryonic words suckling at me, demanding me, refusing to take form, refusing
to emerge and infuse my action with purpose; dying of the rage
that inflames me to boiling, collecting me
like steam on a window, stitched lips
bulging against the strain of everything unintelligible. I have no defense.

Any of it is hardly worth writing anymore, bad poetry aside.