How early morning light
Discovers a new pucker, a fine line
The crepe of hands unwrung from fear
Too many years I was hostage to you
Terror
Thinking age would only color more vivid
That anxious sickness, a trembling nerve
Raw to this unforgiving gallivant
Pills can only gloss over the root
Purple and bruised
It is not enough to look away
You will meet in unguarded moment
Yourself
Bilious with trepidation of this gift of life
We have 
Glass blowers of naught and much
Configured our trajectories
To eliminate handling this butchers theatre
We poise through fingers held before our eyes
Seeing segments and no practice of
Wholeness
Given to calm souls
Seeking just enough
I do not know how
To carve peace
Like a white horse out of chalky cliffs side
To stand as marker 
When the sea gathers her cockled skirts and rises
Over our heads
**
As a child I wet the bed
In roacharch patterns
One was a tiger
The other a shooting star 
And as I stood craning my neck to see 
The tiger clamped onto my small foot and dragged me beneath
Where only fear and marbles lay
Without direction or elucidate
My nightgown became a map bleached of purpose, bleating surrender
My hands grew like midnight iris, long and stray
Unable to capture magnification
**
We learn our hobble
We embrace killer 
Of playtime
Sketching devil’s from unknowns
Casting deep nets with myriad holes
Surely nothing alive
Shall follow our wake
As Persephone
It is in the silt at the bottom we stay
Conned by shadows into believing
The fur lined pockets of nightmares
** 
With this lantern
Pressed against a desire to scream
Abandon effort, rebuke change
For how foolish we feel
Naked again, starting over like blind mice
For how scared the taste
Of difference
So long appeased by secluded ideal
Poisoning thatched way
As we think we know, we undo
The signs and wonder
Glimmering in transit, should we observe
It is 
Never too late
To learn 
The effort of 
Fighting against
Fear
She only survives when
In our desperate cast we 
Feed her habit 
**
I turn 
Away
Lowering my hands from my face
Seeing without mask 
The fullness of being afraid
Staying steadfast
One foot in front of the other
Forms
Links of intention
A necklace
Keeping us together
Though wind and rain comes
We seek the hour when it will be
True
Unmade of nerved past
A natural walk 
Simply forward