lately my hands, they don't feel like mine

"my eyes been stung with dust and blind,
held you in my arms one time, lost you just the same. "

i miss the naivety of being young,
i miss walking in on my loved ones,
glassy eyed & lost,
& it never crossed my mind that they were... losing.
it never crossed my mind that their broken bodies
were being beaten down by their controlled self-abuse.
it never occurred to me that their cancer,
was a tumor they painted into their skulls.

if i could...

i would have dripped water on to their paintings

and washed and recycled the colors...
into something that warmed them,
that loved them,
that found them.
could i have saved you?
could i have sing-song-sung a perfect sonnet,
would my watercoloured attempts be enough?

Your screaming lullabye taught me how to breathe, how to love,

and... how to see. You forced my fluttered eyelids to shock themselves wide open,
& like the feeling of diving into the bliss of the morning's searing sunlight,
I could never be blind again. 

But the one thing i'm blind to, will destroy me. The one thing I can't force my eyelids open to, for fear of the thrashing rain stinging them dry... is me, & what i've done, & who i've become.
Find me. I'm here. Stacked in the shelves of your lullabye.

It could, should, would have been me. Will it, be me?

The green in our eyes flecked two of the same,
wish, wash your pain away.

"jolene, i ain't about to go straight. it's too late.
i found myself face down in the ditch, booze in my hair,
blood on my lips."