Once more, from the crows nest.

In the Catacombs of London
One is afforded the opportunity
To walk, single file.
To visit with the bones of the dead,
To smell the absence of flesh,
To see what is left,
To examine themselves, upon exit:
What do I have, that they don't?
Plans.
What do they have, that I don't?
Freedom.

I will be accepting visitors
Single file
In this tomb tonight
The last night that it belongs to me
And in the morning, with holes freshly spackled,
Walls scrubbed,
I will hand over my keys,
And with everything I own stuffed into my rickety station wagon
I will forget everything I lost here-
Everything.
You forgot what I lost not moments after I told you.
So I realize, finally,
I'm allowed to forget, too.

C+ -- Watch your spelling. See me.

There are many choices
Offered grammatically to us
In the punctuation of endings:
An ellipses begs us to wait
A comma takes only a breath of rest
Before continuing forward, making lists, categorizing
Drawing conclusions.
A semi-colon binds the unrelated, creates relationships
In it's forward motion-- asks us to consider connectivity.

The period, though.
That's a different story.
It gives us permission
To think about something new.

.

An ending as a chance to let something else live?

Spirit animal.

It makes sense, that it's the crow.
All wind and darkness and flapping like beating hearts
Stiff, velvet feathers swatting at the insides of my rib cage.

At the heart of me, I imagine, there is a water tower-
A nest.
And me, afraid of heights, but too stubborn to tell anyone
When the time comes to be brave.

From the 5 stages of grief.

5. Acceptance

My sister says the best ending would be to just walk out
on your partner in the movie theater. An ending
you don't have to look at, looking at the screen instead,
distracted while your heart hops over the chairs,
down the aisle, past spilled popcorn and jackets, asking,
are you really leaving, now, just as the story gets good?

An ending with a bow. An ending as a death.
An ending as a birth. An ending you don't call an ending.
An ending as a chance to let something else live.

-from wind, in the making, by Harmony Hazard

A shorter shadow.

With the coming of my twilight here, and
In the waning of this terrible light
My shadow is slowly disappearing from this place:
First a couch,
A box of clothing six sizes too big
Some books that weren't mine,
and then an unanswered phone call - an unintentional goodbye.

The yoyo that had been released and dragging
Knotted up in best's fingers--
It's string is cut squarely in two: so that I may attempt
To tie up loose ends.
Square knots, sloppy, and like a little girl, clumsy
So that no matter how hard I try to make my double knots overlap
They fall separate, form a chain
Look like bedsheets dangling
from my 3rd floor window outside of the train station:
An escape.

Grey tweed.

Today I sold our couch.
The one you picked up on your own
Shoved haphazardly in the back of your blue hatchback
It saw three houses, and sat dormant in the last, until the end of us.
When I camped out in the guest room, silent, mourning.
Did you know I was mourning?
How could I blame you for not knowing,
When I became wordless, paralyzed by the idea of killing us off.
Of letting us go.

I sold it today.
And then I went to brunch.
Every time I sell a piece of you and me
I toast to you, silently.
This time a cranberry mimosa
I let the ice cubes roll around in my mouth
And there was barely room for them in there
Among all of the things unspoken
That I hold behind my tongue.