Grey Pieces, Grey Dreams

It's a warning sign, the grey flashing inside of me like a tsunami.

The ocean draws back every year, exposing the sea floor of a broken soul

With its white shells, its wet pebbles, its gaping fish hungry for water.

The sun isn't here but blotted out by thick clouds; the fog rolls in.

It touches the drying sand as somewhere a thick wave growls its approach.

Normalcy hunts efficiently, constantly, and it will come back soon enough.

.

I am not the ocean and I am not the beach but the grey fog in between.

The waves pull further back until they barely make the horizon flat

While this world shifts into tones of beautiful grey, dark and light.

The fish have shut their mouths but they've not yet died and on the shore

Stands a creature nude to the world yet cloaked in a shroud of grey mist,

Watching, listening, breathing in the fog, and letting the divide fall.

.

I am bleeding out, drying out, beneath this beautiful grey mist.

Long hair, short hair, the sands on the beach refuse to move even with

The oscillation of identity, blending, blurring, breathing inside the mist.

Bones don't change and neither do the carcasses on the seafloor.

The water was their grave and now the air is their foggy afterlife.

They are no more alive now than they were then, smothered, dead.

.

What will they exhume from the exposed seafloor of my soul?

A bassline shifts between repetitive taps of low, lower, and lowest.

It is in the chest, in the soaked sand, in the rocks, in the spines of the fish.

How easy it is to fall into the monotonous tapping, slip away to the grey.

There are secrets in the hollow holes of the creature's shadowed bones

And they tap too, against dilated pupils, grey irises, scleras gone red.

.

I want the tide to stay lost so I can dream in this in-between forever.

The creature floats on the fog, one foot slipping in front of the other,

Miles out into the lovely in-between with the tepid temperature going cool.

There is one more than the other, one dominant, one submissive.

They like to play chess on the forest floor at midnight,

Knocking over white and black pieces, laughing like it didn't matter.

.

I yearn for the pieces I do not have that should belong but never arrived.

Black and white like to play around and make fire just to see the smoke.

They like to dip their hands in the unearthed sand and see it sparkle.

It doesn't take away the empty ache in the middle of the world,

Hollowing a hallowed core that knows what kind of shadow it casts.

There should be heaviness like lead in that body but there is nothing.

.

There is a lightness to me, an emptiness in my soul that shouldn't be.

There should be a knife lost in the forest but there's a trapped diver

Bleeding out the last of his words inside a very deep cave instead.

There should be gleaming pride in the creature's eyes but there is a bat,

Blind and weary and full of disease, flapping and falling into the dark maw,

The mouth of the thing that shouldn't be.

.

I am cold in the water, desperate for warmth but I'm afraid of summer.

June is just one month of twelve and safety doesn't keep

So back the creature has to go, off and underwater, down to the deep.

Maybe next time the ocean won't be so cold, unwelcoming, and bold,

Like the silver glass of a reflection that speaks in riddles, rhymes, and lies.

Maybe next time breath will be easy and grey will be natural.

.

I think though that I will lay down and let the water drown me.

It's a homicide of the soul,

A pre-meditated slaughter of the pretty thing with opalescent wings

And a grey, easy smile that feels like a beautiful graveyard fog of autumn.

It's a shame, a loss that the moon will mourn when it hides its face.

But the creature doesn't see the grief, only the divide, only this or that.

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Super long poem is inspired by Pride Month. I won't say what it's about specifically but I will encourage you all to use your imagination. This is a poem I consider incredibly layered. It's a bit more personal to me, extremely personal if I'm honest and I generally don't write poems like that anymore. So enjoy!