And in the breath of that relief, so too did it leave me be to me. I laid myself barren and I was enough for only me. Not anyone else ultimately. Frequency. Vibes. Resonance. Alignment. It’s all the talk these days. One can’t not learn about it with any honest look around. If any such was matching with me, it was only in my own head to grapple with.

Do you know what it’s like to have the contents of your soul cost you everything? And so I withdrew within. Farther within than I could have foreseen.

Everyone else gets what they want and need. All the relationality I saw as quintessential for humans, for happening, the irony of my foresight with seeing it, laboring for standing for its existence to become more and flourish, 75,000 miles, so many community meetings, being, that I would be left behind ultimately. I guess I truly needed nobody. My honest ache of a lesson.

I scream inside where no one can hear these days. I bleed and cry just as I will heal maybe, maybe, maybe even sing in time without too needing anyone to truly see me, to ever meet me. I’ve no singing voice anyways. My lungs and throat scarred from having lived once as a child in a house that meth was cooked in prior. These now normalized western fires, smoke filled skies, and humidity lacking air don’t help much either. My very body wasn’t made for this ecology.

I don’t even know if I’m meetable of a human anymore. I am learning how to be my everything. Why does that hurt so much? Why did it not sting before? I’ve spent years alone prior. Why does it now, now that I haven’t even the bandwidth to look for more for me? Maybe that’s the point. Maybe I’m not supposed to look for anything for me anymore.

I write now in the solitude and recesses of my own making of a space that no one knows of so as to keep my heart alive for but me. There is such risk of the heart itself dying without a soul to share or meet it with. And there’s no one in my mundane life I heartfully want to share it with consistently. My daughter sure, but she is too young to meet me.

Too many years of silence, what is so wrong with me? I don’t want to be perfect. I don’t even want to pretend I have to be. Am I that terrible and alienating? I certainly must be. It’s the only thing that makes sense to me. I’m okay dying now soulfully. Maybe even staying dead to me.

It’s a gut wrenching humility to reconcile the only place you are genuinely appreciated in life is serving people food and beverage in a hired minimum wage establishment. Four decades of living with no depth of relationships much to show for it anymore. How quickly loved ones can slip out of our lives and us theirs. And I try and I try and I try to think I could go back in intimacy, to anyone I loved so close in my mundane living reality, my father’s daughter, my family I have always felt so alienated from, though we of course are in touch and I do love them, but in my heart of hearts and depths of soul, I know I can’t. It’s nauseating to think I could go back to my old friends I had locally in this life. For reasons I won’t speak, I know in any sacred sense, I can’t. I’m grateful some of my neighbors were so cruel ultimately. I don’t care if the world is staged to perceive them differently. I have nothing to prove to anybody.

My life is gutted most thoroughly. I am not truly honest about its depths with anybody mundanely. Nor do I care to be. I am honest with myself and that is what matters most to me.

I’m fallen
broken
barren
just another washed up
immigrant
useless on the streets
of North America
never asked to be here
did not want to be here
skid row front row
some hundreds of years of this
oh, good God
how I wanted to be there
in my homelands
like near every ancestor
before me
before so many

I don’t dream here the same
my thumb out
cosmic interstate
like my sixteen year old
runaway younger self
was on to something
instinctively
more honest than I’d seen before
wrong side of the tracks
placed in the wrong side of soul dreaming
good God why am I here
where it is I am
if nothing is all I am ever left with
why am I still living at all
didn’t choose to be here
neither did near any of my ancestors
if any at all
how I just want to go home
into the arms of the love
where it is I belong
why do I feel like I am pinned here
where it is I do not belong

I am an exuberant being
without room
to be exuberant
with all this vastness
of the Wild West
in front of me
a vastness I know very intimately
and I gave it away
and I gave it away freely
even when it hurts
it also doesn’t
to know who we are
is medicine
to know love exists
in the same time I am in
is worth everything
we can always learn to smile again
is that all I am here to learn though
to smile silver lining by silver lining
until some everlasting grave
is nothing more wanted for me
is nothing more possible for me
is that all that this life is for
for someone like me