Burn

Time is caustic
Burning me slowly
As I squander away my life 
Decaying uncultivated 
As I walk along this road alone
I wish not to wither
I wish not to ignite
But
My life is a desolate field
Never been sown with seeds
Never reaped for fruit or crop
I am unharvested 
And time is a wildfire
That burns what never deserved to be
For the one thing that is my own
Is my life, and it is a life not lived 
So I step off of this deserted road
And step into my field
A field that cannot be called deserted 
If it never once was occupied
And I watch the fire swarm around my ankles
Luring me down
Inviting me into a burning sunset on the ground
Offering a fiery embrace 
And I am so desperate to not be alone
To not be friendless
That even though I know what it will steal
That it isn't a true friend, instead a ravaging thief
And do exactly the opposite of what I wanted
But all the shallow desire to be loved
The shallow desire to make time my friend
That I lay down in my unplowed field
Wild with tangles and brambles
And fire
Then
I 
Let
Myself
Burn

Slowly

In time's timeless embrace. 


-anna sluder 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Time present time

I stand on my toes, on a box, on top of a wheeled chair to reach the clock high above me, so that I can cut the whiskers of it off with a pair of gardening scissors. But I hear a knock at the door and it is present standing in the way holding a fish, she hands it to me, so I ask her what to do with it, she tells me she knows that everything the birds say really matters to me that she knows that I count and store every breath that the trees release, in an empty peanut butter jar under my bed, but that I could not remember my first cold water, there was no recollection of my first bright moon. She tells me to hold the fish and decide what it means to me in terms of love, so that I will remember when I leave this room, and when I go to sleep, that I once loved something new, and small, and grey, and something that had scales and looked nothing like me, and I didn’t know where it came from or where it would go from there, but that that di
Read more

Green

I stand in the door wanting nothing, but to be a part of the little house we built of medium-rare earth and broken eggshells and wriggly worms, the bedroom walls are green and there is a single thought tactfully pinned to its center. I remember that everything is quieter in green, and to find solace in the silent ecstasy of the earth’s preeminent color, to excavate and toss away all the colors until we reach the obvious, that green is the walls, and green is earth, and earth reclaims buildings slowly over time with moss then ivy, then as the buildings dilapidate and become their own graves in gardens of decay, it swallows them whole, like swamps and quicksand I thought would play a much larger role in my girlhood battles than they did. I want to crawl inside of the little house we built and play in the dirt with the worms, I want to be reclaimed by terra cotta clay and tunnels made by ants, and if I need to, I’ll send a note to the green,
Read more

The Only Future I See

I am afraid to make today my home, I am afraid to buy pillows in the comfort of this moment, so I try to imagine the future, I like to think that it is a road lined with flowers in the colors of my youth, but there are no flowers, I don’t even think that if there is a road, it is lined with commas. When I dare my mind to try to imagine the future, I only see myself, no bills, no house, no job, no person, no plan, just myself standing in a field of baby green ampersands, cutting my hair and then holding a small bird, and the bird doesn’t sing for me,  as I promised I would never ask it to, it just stays alive beside me. So most days we break apart plums with our fingers like stories, and we make each day, each plum our home, and we are perfect and we are whole in this interval of quiet, where the sun is the only one who gets to see. -anna sluder
Read more