Smoke (as) break

interruption

intervention

disruption

of the way things are

to have peace

in the way things will eventually be

You do not have to be good

You do not have to walk on your knees

for a thousand miles

pretending.

Smoke dissipates the urge to be

a certain way, disenchanted

It is one with the dust-storm

See how the car lights make gods

from behind the silhouettes

of trees no one planted

Wanting good things

is not becoming a good thing

It is a good thing to fall out

and recognise ephemerality

It is natural, natural, natural.

It is not for a person to be a receptacle for expectations,

in fulfilling which she becomes a reservoir

of words

hopes

ambitions

Art is a skill

at making the unmanifestable, manifest.

Do not get bent out of a shape —

Shift.

Integrating

all of me

the urges with the ideas

the breaks with the wholeness

as I am, I can be

Out of so many ways the world offers

Refine yours

without fixity, with reckoning

Who is stability for?

There is a life, the only one you can live

that only you can live

Help is a melting glacier

drown in its chilly waters

Sharp cuts to the bone

gashes filled with collaborative beauty

Bleeding out, translucence

letting the gaps stay empty

is the only way to see the inside of

skin muscle tendon bone

what will this seeing generate?

Jagged edges of open wounds

they call for recognition too

hesitantly, whispering

but look at them light up

when you see them without the pathologising

They belong where they are

from where something will be generated

the common midway of letting them be

and loving their unique ways of making

meaning

of suffering

patience

healing

Imagine the glory of scars

that found their own way to the surface.

Those lives that kept you together — with the open gashes

friends, lovers, ancestors, gods

their satisfied nodding

to your ability to breathe

when you shouldn’t have been alive

is a work of art

that you collaborated on.