Poetry 149: Tides

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.
Don’t let yourself lose me. 
-Rainer Maria Rilke


Tides

The flowing water

moves in and out
like a current
in the canals
of my heart.

First filling,

filling, filling up;
then draining,
out into emptiness.

It is tidal,

rhythmic.

But I forget that.

Oh, how I forget

there will be
a next time, and
how excruciating
when that scaly,
bottoming-out
comes like a
drought that leaves me
feeling heavy as molasses,
yet bone dry.

How can it be, I think,

when just yesterday
I was riding
the wind into tomorrow?
And now, there is not
a  hint of breeze
within a 2,000 miles radius.

Now, the air

is thick and the night
is long, all I
I want to do
is crawl under this
desk and rock
the blackness away.

Though it is

true, there
is great freedom
for one who travels
alone, there is
equal sorrow.
Because in the
emptiness
I want to cry out,
but, like the canals
that run through me,
the tear ducts dried up long ago
when I realized nobody
would come.

For nobody

tells you about the day
after you take
the road less
traveled by,
with its extreme
loneliness when
the tides have receded
once again.

God bless the Chinese food,

the news feed,
the clothes from
the consignment store-
they can take the edge off.
But the underlying
vacancy will remain
until the moon shifts
position and the droplets
of hope begin
to flood
the heart again.

I must try to

remember that
the ebb and flow
of the tides
will never stop
while I live in this
plane on consciousness;
I know too,
they will not
destroy me.

Not this thirst.

This hunger.
This horrific ache.

Like the earth

Mother and her
flowing waters,
I will forever rise again.
And again.
And again.

So will you.

-Me