sea, salt, and sand

when we speak, it'll be in whispers spoken with cracked throats and rasping tongues. it'll be the time i'll take all your misspoken words, all your sharp edged syllables and vowels, and swallow them into the silence behind my lacquered eyes. i'll smooth away the roughness, shave away the imperfections that cling to your brittled skin like lizard scales. i'll quiet the disturbances in your soul with steady hands and a heavy heart, a callous reverie plagued with genuine concern.

i'll do anything for you, taking pain on silent wings and sealed lips, watching blood bleed from drying bones. i'll cast out the shadowy image of an uncertain soul, lock it beneath layers of silt and cells, crimson and cotton band-aids.  i'll shove everything to the wayside, catch the waves of pandemonium upon my own shoulders and grit my teeth as small stones and broken shells carve their names into the flesh of my curved back like individual pieces of iron.

i'll hold up the walls, keep the cement and steeled pillars from collapsing inward, and stand straight when you ask me too. i'll keep my feet planted firmly in the riverbed, refusing to relinquish control to an unnerved tide and a sweeping current that beckons me onward to release and numbness and solitude lurking beneath roiling wave depths.

i won't tell you that when the ocean calls to me, i feel the answer pulling deep within my soul like a string, i won't tell you that some nights i long to lay beneath icy river waters spilling into brackish bays and feel my lungs contract with each breath of sea and salt and sand. i won't tell you any of this.

because telling you would give the shadows breath to breathe, life to move, concern to grow into impassioned vines of oak and ivy and sumac that have no stopping point, no end. i am all of this to you, a sponge to your disarray, to your disbeliefs, to your dishonesties, so that i am not any of me.

you wouldn't want to know what lies behind this paper tower of make believe, wouldn't want to know what waits with baited teeth and crooked nails behind these hastily scrawled notes and skewed letterings. i'm ragged and raw,  and for a little while, taking all that you are, all of your rugged imperfections and lies within, i can pretend for awhile that it's not just me, not just me that aches with the calling of something they cannot understand.

so i'll stand here, waves crashing against my back, stones chipping away my resolve, sand slipping beneath my toes, and hold my ground for as long as i can, keeping you above angry ocean waters and dwelling shadows. i'll stand here, waiting for the day the riptide finally yanks me beneath the icy surface and i disappear from your sight and your sound and your touch. i'll fade back into the sea and the salt and the sand, feeling cells burst free from the flood. you see, wild things must always return back to where they came from; i will be no exception.