Full Moon in Leo

the moon is a candy apple in the sky with a roman candle core and all around me there are kids swinging bags of carnival goldfish, all my cigars stomped out on the floor. every light shrieks its brightest spark right before it goes out. when the sun is at the crest of the sky it’s already getting into form for its dive down to the underworld. 

i’ve dug out the pits and sinkholes, ripped clods of bacteria from the pores, and i stare down the demon with plain eyes
face arranged the way i was trained to arrange it
hands too brittle and delicate, like in dreams where you try to fight
and you can’t.
and from here, what do we do?
i see enough of the picture
but the more i refuse to cower, the stronger the sick lizard gets
until my entire body is heavy
until i become
a net of dead fish staring into the digital sky. pixels scurry together in the frozen night.
i should be drinking dewdrops and smelling jasmine in open meadows. we were never here to live like this.

for years i’ve rip open my chest and let the hornets howl. i space out those screams like morse code. but before that i was a kid who thought
a champagne flute was the most marvelous vessel in the world and i was wrong.
i’ve learned
that i’m something else: i’m a human, jawline and twisted spine, who comes with you to the ground in search of roots. i want to sit with you for hours and months and years and dig together, swim in your underground lakes, process the taste of you little by little, listen to the baby inside of you who’s still screaming,
and give them comfort. give them space.
find the empty breast and help you latch on. that’s what love is.

more than anything i want to swim my own sea,
eat my fruit,
and live in peace.
but there’s always this cat,
or as anne sexton once called it, a “gnawing, pestilential rat,”
who keeps clawing at the door, calling for something she’s never even seen.
but what is the bail set at and to whom do i pay it?
who is the jailor and who is the judge?

there’s a set of chimes in my body that sound when enough
has been enough,
but enough is never enough in a world of sons.

so there is nothing more to do but become blood and love
as we sweat in the daylight.

i take a bite of that last spark.
sigh.
and release.