Stickfolk

Clawing, scraping, dead on me,

Breathing, taking, what you see,

Empty walls and cloying white,

Cancelling out all my sight.

Bones stand out in sharp relief,

Skin gone gray with more than grief,

The rattling, dragging of my lungs,

The never-changing morning sun.

Day-to-day, night-to-night,

Nothing changes, not my life.

Where to go? There is no home!

Dying trees scream in my bones.

The easy thing would be to accept,

Never leave, be bereft,

And yet the fire will not let me leave,

There’s more to life I’ve yet to weave.

Do

Not

Let

Go.

Rattling branches, clacking teeth,

So much kept underneath.

To share, to scream, would be dismissed,

Being needed more effective than this

To keep me in place and never leave,

So much struggle to even breathe.

And yet the monster running deep

Screams world-shattering anger at being forced to creep.

Gnawing, hungry, desperate, rage,

Fire waiting to consume the page

Of the book that is my life

Always resting on the knife’s-

Edge, wanting to leap, yet not dare—

YOU DO NOT HURT THE ONES FOR WHO YOU CARE—

Not even if the clawing, scraping grasp

Will not let go so you can gasp.

Gnaw your own bones if you want to survive,

Or let the fire be all that keeps you alive.

Do.

NOT.

Let.

Go.

Scraping branches, wheezing sighs,

Stickfolk watching through dark eyes,

Waiting for the moment the fire gutters and slips,

Waiting for nothing more to go past your lips,

Waiting for you to become still,

Waiting for you to have no will,

Waiting for the final collapse,

Waiting for you to fall into their bleached-bark grasp.

So easy to become like them,

So easy to cross that line,

And if you don’t accept that cost

You had best hope that you can find

A way off the island, away from the bleached-bone white,

Because if you don’t there’s a limited amount of time

Before there’s no meaning left in sight—

And you will fade from gray to white.