Sometimes Some Times

by Anna Ruiz

Sometimes dragons and silver-furred foxes steal your dreams away
and beg the sun to shine
when you just know your breaking heart can’t take even one more tear,
and the fullness of your empty life stares back at you with golden eyes.
Fire starts burning away your every desire;
you chafe you splinter and shatter against moonlight
with the glare of your own purity.
There is hardly anyone home any more,
and you have shaken your foundation to the level of your arms:
you can’t hold on to two things at the same time,
and the wind knows which way to blow, right through your Soul,
now you have fallen to the level of your prayer-poems in that dark night.

Absolution does not come easily, and momentum gains no trust;
a wicked sneer flashes against the image in the mirror:
this cannot really be you, or is it?
So you breathe between amnesia and discontent
and walk the walk with Silence.
An in-between breath escapes like a wounded animal
or a nightingale free from her gilded cage
or Ann’s hummingbird at rest in a red hibiscus,
and you tear yourself apart to know the DNA you inherited.
Now the songs and prayers of the ages you sing less noteworthily,
less hypocritically,
nevertheless you have no other songs to sing.

You start dreaming indistinct memories of pure water,
of drowning in your own sorrows;
you notice the blade you have held against your raw red throat
is now rusty,
and you notice the second to the last breath
is the hardest one to let go.