Sink

To sink down below into the bathwater is to be the word that no one says out of fear of offending and the book that someone picks up but puts back down after finding no summary and the song that would be great if it weren't for that pounding bass and the sonnet you can't quite get through all the rhymes and rhythms and metaphors and the mountain that was moved when it had its back turned and the sky whose ceiling was exposed to the light and the dark and Heaven and Hell, who decided to give up, hang its head, and cry. To awake face down with fatal gasps like cymbals crash is to believe it all, like a New Year’s resolution, short of expectations. The bathtub’s full of falling short and hot water and I’ve got to endlessly scrub the small town off of me. You can only be surrounded by yellow teeth and half-formed slang words for so long before you start looking bigger. After a while you start to look past the potato chip factory to find some jagged lines set against the sky. You ignore the rusting cars sitting in the street, awaiting a day when they will be driven again, and you look at the big picture. And you see faces. And I see faces with sloping cheeks that artists die to draw and faces that show an autobiography in lines and ones with number-the-stars freckles and half-moon smiles and ones that hold ostensible honesty and I think I see your face too. But then again, that just may be the billowing factory smoke, reminding me there is a life after fifteen years. The next time that you have that feeling that aching that wanting don’t hold it in, and don’t hold it back, like so many before you have. Let your heart break like a water balloon, let its fillings run down your body, and let them collect in your toes like growing puddles and don’t let them tell you that you’re a four letter word or that you’re an abandoned half-read book or a song or a sonnet or a mountain or a sky that’s just not good enough. Know that the raw force that courses through you is hope – and don’t call it a revival, a rebirth a resurrection or even a renewal, and don’t call it a comeback because it’s always been there.