Keep your face always towards the sunshine - and shadows 

will fall behind you.

-Walt Whitman

have you named the moonless world

the winter ache

the sunless tremble inside of you?

yes, i took the words from the poems i'm not honest enough to write yet.

i took the words and i let the lies stain my hands like cherry blood.

like wine breath.

so when the tourists came, they knew what you did?

each one: catching the feathers as a flock of confessions left the sky in me.

and when the storms listened, did they hear the shake in your body?

they were silent as snow when my lion fight roared.

they ran the other way.

they never looked back.

what men turned wolf at the sight of your love?

all that looked expecting light, only to find the sun's broken promise.

they hated my full moon heart.

and afterwards, what was it like?

i was shadow dark. 

i was cloud break.

i was thunder threat.

did you hear the stories of the ones who'd come to save you?

their golden honest, their steady hands?

yes, and they came, and they were beautiful until they weren't.

they laid their decay at my feet and couldn't look me in the eye.

to anyone else, all that rot would have looked like a soft landing.

a gift.

but to you?

it was just a trick of the light.

another fallen angel who never made it back home.

the voices, did they whisper you gentle?

they showed up in a dream once and told me their own hearts were failing them.

when i woke up, i spoke in flatline.

i searched my tongue for death.

and the ones who only loved you when your voice was lullaby quiet?

i showed them my loud. i woke them from their sleep.

-Y.Z. Questions Asked in a Dream, Part III