Someone Called It a Candle, Slowly Flickering Out

Gets Around in My Head

Ambient light
now sneaks its way into my room
at night the way it
sneaks away the stars
and nothing is ever truly dark,
not anymore.
Even the moon is lost somewhere,
though, occasionally, I can see it peer
over the lake, on the Michigan
side of life.
Everything is closer, cramped in
and tight around me,
suffocating in an intoxicating way.

And my throat longs for the freedom
of places I’ve come from
where everything was good and right,
wholesome and predictable,
and nobody lost their job, their money,
no body lost their life.
It was safe, where—
though we knew not where
we were going or how to get there—
we believed we could handle anything,
we believed it was possible to leave.

Leaving was one thing, living is another.
And, though part of my body and my heart
yearn for the place in which safety nets were cast
around every corner, the rest would be hard pressed
to turn around and go back
to that innocence and that naivety
to that life in which I was miserable
living too far from ambient light.

Sure, I could go back, and return myself
to the state of mind I was once in, if only
to abolish this particular thought process.
But leaving is one thing, living another;
and, it’s important to remember
I had never done much living,
neither here nor there;
I’d never been living before.