Murky Blue
Letting go
Born into life and born into death arriving too early but much too late straight into the frigid mold of a blinding atmosphere during one murky blue night inside a tantalizing picture of home — a structure of circulating ideas that stood sullen on a constricted road where it was easy to pretend my heart wasn’t divided into one-way lanes paved with solitude and idle ideas that bloomed movement after I could no longer speak to you with an understanding grace
Usual mantras of busy business as usual no pains no gains I grew up over and over trying to speak too hard and squint too close to get a better view under your steel door wishing you would open it to see me wanting to see you just a little bit more
Neverending questions asked in vain — is it good enough? am I bold enough? does everything I do stand on its own enough? do I use the right words enough? does my hair spin golden locks like a fairy tale that rhymes enough? Speaking through a faraway voice that was never my own and burning myself with blistering ashes of molten attachments because I stayed too close to their raging fires — while constantly having to catch my breath and exhaling when I should have been inhaling while reverberating myself in grey tones from someone else's music making — so I kept singing songs full of whispering sadness wrapped inside fractured lullabies and sautéed with lonesome noxious notes
Then later I saw you sewing her pretty blue seams with glittering needles and the latest sewing machines she was always the one dancing in your delicate dreams and you were forever blowing her half-thoughts and candy kisses out the old bay window while scraping the crispy lead paint off your deadbolted broken door — with your gleaming smile and hair that was always as good as new you asked me if you could take her with you when you left for the old cemetery that was slowly sinking into the barren homeless seashore
Meanwhile my self-imposed leftover murky blue — color coated my view of the carelessly knotted strings and bounds making for messy wounds leaving me continuously trapped in my own grief-stricken sounds
I could only hear my heart beating in the dead of night when the moon French kissed the stars and sprouted spinning comets from all futures of infinite pasts — spawning vibrations that had me peeling layers by unzipping my sickly sorrowful skin and swimming to violent depths only to find my memories encased in muddy years of stone cold attachments
The crows cried foul as my heart unleashed a deadly howl during that wicked blustery Blue Moon night — as I stood sinking my teeth into the gritty moonlight madness of clutching onto people with a calmly deceptive death grip
Let it go the aching splintered starry sky whispered to me in pulsating radiating rhythms — enough of denying plain sight
No more of worrying how your eyes saw her — or if only my appearance was this way or that way — and how I could have done this or that — throwing in a few what-ifs— fueled by maybes sprinkled with shoulds — time to detach and unbind in all layers of awareness leaking from pockets placed inside my sickly unaware mind
So I can sink inside of myself and bleed my core into the graves of forever allowing my bones to fold into peaceful tidal waves that flow effortlessly into effervescent pools of silent stillness in motion— without ever needing to disturb the dust caked on your already closed door
This poem is about letting go of people you’ve walked with throughout your life and how they view you. It’s been eye-opening for me to realize how deep it all truly goes.
It’s something I’ve been working on lately and the timing of Paroma Sen’s very thoughtful prompt was of course, perfect: