Not Surrender But Defeat

Not Surrender But Defeat

When the weight
of inevitability
is too heavy
for your neck
to keep straight.
When a year
like this one
forces you to
face mortality
with a sideways
glanced guilt
so strong it curls
your belly with
what you could
have done,
the heart, too,
pulls, pulls,
and curves your posture
with its clamorous
exhaustion.

This year
I kept fighting,
I did not surrender,
but I must accept defeat

and look forward to training
for the battles still to come.

Because if there’s anything
we all know:
the battles will come.

 

I Have Nothing. Take It.

I have nothing. Take it.
I made a list of everything I’m not honest about.
It was a list of everything I write about.
I made a list of all of my lists. I didn’t finish it. I’m still adding to it. I’ll never finish it.
All the lists ever made have this one thing in common: they are incomplete.

I am a list of nothing.

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There’s a list of 10, but really it’s an infinite list and inevitably it’s a list of one. Which is everything, all encompassing.

And so nothing.

There’s also a list of 13, stemming from one, but really it’s more than 13 with all the derivative lists from that list.

And all of the inestimable derivatives, too, each subdivided and partitioned and split and fractioned path, their familiar roots and creaking branches and delicate stems tangled and twisted by winds blowing through the greatest minds, blowing through the highest and lowest times, through history and remembrance into a list of one, which is a list of everything, all of existence and all of memory, so the enumerator too is part of the one, and so all is nothing in the face of that one: Gd.

I have nothing. Take it.
I inventoried, checked boxes, made graphs. It all adds up to nothing, zilch, nada.
I counted all the feels. They amounted to nothing. They may have once been something. But then: time.
I stand to be counted. I am standing. I am standing alone in an anonymous room. I am invisible, therefore I am nothing.
I raise my voice to be heard. I write posts. I laugh at everyone. I empty myself of tears. None of it matters.
I took a poll. I took a census. I took attendance. I counted it all up. It all came to nothing.

I have nothing. Will you take it?
Will you see me? Will you hear me?
I have nothing. What am I but nothing?
Can you love me even though I am nothing right here in front of you?