To Whom it "Concerns:"

You would.

You would take my

Unobtrusive grief,

My most gnarled wound,

And stain it with the fetid acid

Slobbering

From your gossiping gob.

You would hammer and bend up

The narrative

To prop your caved ego,

Attempt to turn the witnesses

Of my white-scarred heart

Hostile.

You would circle and loiter about,

Diseased vulture,

Gorge yourself

On the wreckage of my loss-

Just your latest

Disaster porn.

…

I could.

I could take what I know,

Nothing more,

Mere facts,

Seed the clouds

And watch the earth

Get washed from under your feet.

I could call a meeting

With one bullet point,

Announce your propensity

To act out the same lie

While you play at zealotry,

Hypocrite bottom feeder.

I could, but for the collateral price,

The ones you’d claw onto

On the way down…

So I’ll leave you to the gnawing grubs

Quietly infesting you, digesting you

Inside out.

-kc

Waiting

The indeterminable sky -

A smattering of blues and greys

As the day grows old,

Nuanced in its denouement.

The long summer grasses

Stir and murmur

With a listless breeze

And the business of insects.

Two crows on tilted wings

Loud with endless sass,

Careen sarcastically

Over tufts of pungent yarrow.

This, suffusing

A single moment

In a sweeping tract of moments

In which I wait for you.

- kc

Clarity

To plainly know

what is right

and what is not,

Despite

the Gaussian blur

on my eyes,

Despite the fracture

of landscape

and the fresh shudder

of misalignment,

Is a lithe

Unfolding strength - 

an unexpected

sinuosity of self

To quiver and flex,

but set fast

In accordance with 

some unearthed

Demarcation,

Raise my head, square up

with the transience of what is.

- kc

Weight

Despair - 

low grade, worming, 

not fatal:

A relentless sense of loss

shadowed behind the heart.

Something I've become

accustomed to - 

heaviness, a sighing in the veins,

an immutability lost to articulation

keeping me apart.

The mass effect of it,

a petrification, a pulling nervosa 

that harries each landscape.

This quiet, coiled up grief

that stays, still weighs

despite the passing of years, the

distance from one life and 

inevitably, this other.

I am away,

withdrawn.

But I will,

I have decided,

I will plod towards

the quivering murmurations of light.

I will inhale

emanations of loamy earth.

I will heave my way forward

until I disappear beneath myself

or lift up, like a heron from the field,

into the crumbling grey mist.

- kc