" 'Eclipse' is related to the Greek word for abandonment" -RBD, draft 82
outside of the poem, nothing
this story eclipses me
do i ever get to leave childhood
at the border, an edge designed to threaten
i was numb but wanted to appear
mostly intact. learn to shine
learn to pull up to love, where no setting for you
stands. and anyway, i go out on what rises
before me: i was the choice people made
breaking because hard exists only in relation
to what must bend because of it
space will consume you: the poem
is all i knew of safe, i built it out into places
to hold more and then that too abandoned me
it looked like i was leaving the way i framed
picture this truth, the soft ways we go under
is what undoes us. no one is listening finally.
i was invisible and thought being seen
was the path but it was seeing itself
love in this life is masked illusion
a child marked by a sign not yet translated
i did not want any life that came before me
i did not want this life before me
& that colored the hours most, they
flee from me that sometime did we seek
sought not, looked up as it darkens
the swollen spot where light pours in
not cracks, not fissures, but time
time itself we crumble under
i was outside it and never coming back
