Too old to follow the rules and too tired to keep breaking them. The ennui of causing all the trouble you’ve ever desired, to dare to dance with demons just to feel alive again.

How many years is my sentence? How much penance must be paid before the debt is clear?

You can’t earn your way into grace, and some of us will never be fully brought back into the light again.

Some are the living examples, the reasons why you stay in line. Nearly everyone, no matter how wild you may have been, finds a way into the queue.

And when you refuse?

No one is marking your growth when you are a marked woman. No one watches the wisps of birthday candle smoke once the wish has been made. No one is worried about the strain on the yoke, just the yield of the harvest.

Imagine if you solved the puzzle, and when you showed it to others, they set it on fire and then slit your throat over the ashes. Over and over.

How many times do you go gracefully into the light before you wonder if it isn’t better to sow the darkness?

Midnight in a soul can last a week, a month, a year. A lifetime? An infinity? What if you have broken so many rules that even the Universe stops loving you?

I know what you can carry, It says. But maybe It doesn’t. Maybe you’re the experiment to see the limit.

How many ways can a soul break?

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When people talk to my Entire Self, they regard her/him like a panther. Cagey, anxious, tremulous, narrow-eyed. S/he cannot be trusted- notoriously mercurial and violent, a perfect vision of the childish fits befitting a Greek myth.

My love is the capriciousness of the incoming tide, and we are all at its mercy.

Every time I try to come here to learn to be softer, kinder, and every time I come here, I receive endless abuse, violence, shame.

I am discarded. I fall in love with ghosts, both living and dead.

Those that love me cannot truly reach me, stretching desperate hands into the damp, putrid well where I live.

Please come into the sun. Look at yourself in the light.

But when you know that you were not built for love, when you know that clouds will obscure the sun when you attempt to walk into its light, what is the purpose of being more accessible?

Time has taken everything but granite and lightning.

When a plate breaks too many times, the pieces are too pulverized to be placed together again.

I am the gaps in the whole. I am the void in the substance. I am the nothing that makes the everything.

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I rage at the moon because she is a reflection of what I know is also true about me- I am just a mirror of the light. I hold none of it, and my dark side is too cold for life. For a few brief hours I catch a bit on my face, a slice that diminishes daily.

Every wax, I am sure it is my time to be seen, but the wane comes and takes it all again.

To cling to a pillow and wail, “Be real! Just be real!” But no warmth ever comes. No soft hands. No gentle mouths.

Real and not real. Whole and empty.

And that is the best love I’ve ever had in this life.

Another dark, beautiful joke. Exactly what I deserve. Loved and not loved. Only the dead can keep me alive.

It’s all a dream. And when you are just a dream, how long before your substance fades?